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Do you hear       as if
in a far away room
down a narrow hall
in another part of the hotel

It’s the gray of canning season rain,
neither cool nor warm, and mottled
with feeble light.

This black sedan lies on its top
on the kitchen window sill, its wheels
in the air, its battery drained,
the oil trickling into the cylinders.

It was not death we came to fear but her life,
her other birth, waking remade from the womb

of that disease. One leg was withered, a dragging-

The pang and clangor of pitch-dense wood
in the stove and the odd, almost syncopated
pops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]