(Mistranslations from the German) VII. In Sleep Birds, nightmoths, spiders, and bats sleep in the dusky trees. Your shadow, lost, like a bird, flaps
I walk local roads when I’m afraid, wonder at others’ schemes, how they carve their lives, their rancorous Christmas lights, their wood- pile lines.
I was a child in a five-boroughed Garden of Eden/city— the given, new, and crumbling, shining, grimy world. And I heard talk of “sixth