Once, in a room no bigger than the bed, 
I made love with a girl.

                                                *

Have you ever made love with a girl?   
Once I hadn’t, then I had.

 

Of the vastness of clouds
We knew nothing;
We slept in houses underground.

The newborn bear has no shape.
The mule rarely gives birth,
The viper only once.

1.

In retrospect I'd been waiting
For years, never speaking.
Never needing to learn. I listened

Snow, rocks darker than any shadow in the world.
We glimpsed another life below us—cottages, goats—

But never imagined it would be so difficult.

I was so young that I invented loss,
The image of the mother's face receding
On the far edge of the broken bed,

The romance of the twelve-year-old who finds
Himself behind the school in a stingray,
How he's never the same. I had a friend

Take Antoine Guillemet instead.
  When he was following that dirty gang
    I thought we lost him. Blinding poppies,