Afterword.

I

Euclid washing his marbled legs

in vinegar looks across to a slave

bathing in blood and milk—she is a blank

page of Tibetan exorcism huddled

alone in the shadows of tree-like vegetables—

the old lama

is eating, happily, roadkill, meat

stamped with the dark blue ink

of a canvas chinese truck—90 mph, listening

to the drone of a dying carburetor.

This holy man was turned

in his dream last night

by the three corpses of girls

joined at the hip

who starved over a bowl

of a thousand flowers.

These ghosts of flying wedge

are warning Euclid alone

of poor solids

and planes of conjugating angles

become the future shortages

of coal, asparagus and pork.

The dead girl polymorphs

swept over Euclid

looking for weight against

a wind that doesn’t exist

in time

but only in space. . . .

Over Diem, Tracy, and Jacqueline

here, I have said

grace, the knives and forks

arranged like rock glyphs

of a desert passage. Now

they must first survive the simple crossing

of a poisoned summer lake.

II

The turtles in the lake are halves

of lemon, a clean signal

from summer to a forgotten winter haystack,

tenement of mice open

to the old owl’s census— his tree

begotten of a peach lichen, improbable

tree, birth of glacier,

in it the snow

grows like the master’s beard—

that is the thing about the summer

it scrapes both knees

and runs to the mother.

Euclid, all morning,

sharpening the nail of his compass.