Just the tambourine—no clarinet, no plane tree—exploding somewhere deep, and the afternoons blown to smithereens.  

Famished, gleaming hawk, drawing circles above the cockerel, shocking him with his beak, breaking open his skull and the hens at his side, pecking up flint to armor his seed.  

Way up high, swallows guzzling flies, scything the air back and forth, but the blue is untouched, trumpeting the heavens till dusk.  

Let's put it behind us then. Memories to the gorse, their fabrics to the apartment blocks. The dreams of hinterlanders, traces of Pelasgians—Cretans—Turks—Franks—Slavs—English—Americans, what quilts, my God, for every kind of bed, what tapestries; the drowsy eye trips up there before slipping like a coalminer into the galleries of sleep. Suddenly nose meets prow, you and a white boat passing between your eyes, parting your blood in two.  

Deep within its keel the drums of the Algerians, and deeper still the anchor that swells inside your heart.