Transcendence of Janus

I am not asleep, but I see a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost of an anonymous painter leaving the prints of death on the wall; the bright feathers of soft birds blowing away in the forest; the bones of fish and the white backs of strange women; your breathing like the slow thunder on the other side of some river as you sleep beside me; old dancing teachers weeping in their offices; toads with bellies as quiet as girls asleep in mansions, dreaming of saddles and pulling the sheets between their legs; fireflies going to sleep on moonseed flowers around a plantation gazebo at dawn; a girl sweating in bed; hawks drifting through the moon; a woman’s hair, the flavor of death, floating in the fog like a flag on a ship full of ghosts, the ghosts of soldiers searching for the graves of their mothers; june bugs listening to Leoncavallo; christ weeping on Coney Island, inevitable, like a fissure in a faggot’s ass; a widower with no sons, a lonesome janitor, a worm in the sun, the dusty sockets of poets, who have lost their eyes, their