A Second of Your Life If you give me a second of your life I could show you how to win a medal, how to become a champion without a fight, show you the different fingers of your hand and how they form the constellations of victory; though the day has gone into the gloam you become smaller and smaller each day. To be reborn is such an easy thing that we can run naked and still be champions, if we keep on running when our heart is on fire, or when we start climbing the hill of age, your knees failing; your teeth clattering, your breath coming in like a tree climber's sigh; or the bush throws its fireballs about; or the moon suddenly withdraws its light, throwing you into the deepest darkness. Be not dismayed when the sky collapses across your path to weigh you down; to win a race, you must keep on running, jumping over hurdles and rocks of old age, until your body gets used to its lightness and growing old becomes a closed hole in a wall. The walls of Jericho fall at the seventh trumpet, after dreams have accumulated vapours and the air becomes denser than moisture.

Fall Song Vivaldi of falling leaves, violin strings, symphony of all summer has come to— last juices leaving limbs, drawing in, leaf crackle of our vinyl 33 needle note-pressed in grooves of your goodbye. Birch leaves yellowing into brown curls like your arms closing around me, maples out-glowing their green, saying *notice*, saying *whoop-tee-doo*, saying don’t waste this change, savor what will drop, grant cover from frost, like sheets we slept between. The beeches hold on as you did at the end—your showy splendor measured in shadow, your flare too much to last, like sunflowers painted by your namesake. Nothing plain in you, not one cell gave way without sparks from the bow. How much you passed on to our children, tender as leaf veins, coloring the world after you. I stand listening to the blinding of leaves, their commanding shiver.

Cathedral *Escuelas Pías de San Fernando, Lavapiés, Madrid* For a moment the bomb enlarges the cathedral. Its belltowers rise and burst as if to proliferate the news of God, the dome riven like an egg against a cast-iron sky. Brick and stone constellate the air. Confetti of silica and pumice plumes above terracotta rooftops and the cathedral collapses inward upon itself in a gesture of supplication. A bomb is never allowed choice. It falls in undiscerning grace to burn and become anything it meets, a momentary, ardent armature of all it destroys. What took years to build is undone in an instant leaving neither the bomb nor the cathedral, nothing but a silence mistaken for the speechlessness of ghosts.

Inheritance To do poor well, take down granny’s black skillet, its mettle keen with decades of scrapple and cheek. Take its heft in your wrist. Mix fistfuls of onion and greens with salt and wilt them as the iron ticks with heat. Then, take cornmeal and eggs, milk and oil and whisk. Whisk until your batter is smooth and your will is as sturdy as johnnycake.

Salt for Sodom I was fired at one on a Friday afternoon. What else could I do, in my reverie, but drive to the beach? I wanted the sea. I saw a woman half-bared in the tide, bronze with the last laugh of the light. I only looked so long against the wind before the sun left signal flares in my closed eyes, and I turned for home. You should pray to be changed by God— so said my father the night I confessed. I waited for sand to rise through my hands, but only the waves came to ruin with me.