LOST AND FOUND IN NEW HAVEN

The vodka-cut artery spurts blood
into the brain. Seven headless women
dance, a daydream of old lovers training
to see Emily, the sweetbreathed baby
born to the old best friend. We all have names
others give us. There there child, sleep now,
sweet dreams, I imagine saying. All the atoms
rest tonight: uranium, plutonium,
beryllium, tritium—water as heavy
as heartbreak. It is the first day of spring
and somehow snowing,

every flake floating
to its death on the mingy ground. Ancient
acid-veined stones streak the right of way.
Garbage too, used shoes, weeds, industrial
rags, fraying closed tool shops. Gray train yards
in sleet wet and bone cold hiss my arrival.
No matter what the mayor says this town
has had it. The old station, pumped full
of money, smiles with new paint and gilding,
like the patient on narcotics in intensive
care. Here, the trains still come and go in both
directions but always end up

where they start.
Outside the station, dogs chase each other
in circles. The flat matted grass, frosted
lime and mud, tears away in clumps. Ducks paddle
under the highway. A gauzy red canvas
up against a concrete wall is the scene
of the crime: automatic weapons spray,
a pool bottom draining, a holey chest,
nothing at all. I seem to have misplaced
my future wife. Every night the morning
comes too fast, off its tracks and grinding.