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                My mother

gathers gladiolas. The gladness

is fractured. As when

the globe with its thousand mirrors

cracked the light. How

it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives

and the show of light

they shot around us: so that

down the dark hall the ghosts danced

with us: down the dark hall

the broken angels.

After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.

Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.

Who can give           an account of occasions

Can     mechanized description so falter

Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline

Each to enable a series of seconds    breaking or burning

Can undo the work of a million years         of human love

if I curse you just right