When I was young I thought words like majesty
had a purpose and were not just decorations
for the divinely inbred, but I have been wrong
about many things. I held my wife by the tail end
in the elevator going up to our honeymoon suite,

and she had a current stronger than any Mississippi.
The clerk at the desk brought us ice in the morning.
A few years later we lost a week in a Parisian hostel.
It was abstract. The lost time boiled off as vapor.
Light streamed around her, changed her. Not holy.

The river wasn’t holy. Nobody I knew would’ve dared
to eat a fish out of it. Not my father,
until he became a hawk and gleamed,
and I don’t know much about Apollinaire,
other than how I imagine him, looking into the Seine

and thinking about the things that remain, weeping
for the things that disappear. I was dramatic
about my country once and tried to give it back
to some minister with his angel feather
tucked in a Bible that would get him to heaven,

and the Creole guitar player I listened to
at an oyster bar the night I met my wife became
a snake in a cemetery tree eating robin eggs,
became an omen or the flag of my country
or both.

I’m tired of retelling the story of the cosmos
one hill, one river, one sloppy armed great great
Italian grandmother at a time. I laugh,
and a sunset overtakes me, closes me down.
The natural world is full of this arrogance,

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