On castaway streets, the little windfall plums beginning to break again | making the pavement at the corner sticky and stained — the pleasure and melancholy of seasonal return | the familiar and ephemeral | my second turn around the island | To the tale of the tormented genius | with feverish finances and the unfortunate habit | of making bad marriages | so quiet in the provinces, one may sit and count the slow, lucid ripples | reaching this gentle backwater | elsewhere has become a legend | and her presence, largely, forgotten | Alcohol does not help | but repetition calls one summer from the last | — in this way | knowing happens, because it was, and is again | no more | The fervour of his delirium, the torture of morals | taken seriously | by a person essentially fickle | no wonder it ended badly | In the middle of the mental breakdown, pay at the counter and leave

I’ve noticed, the horse chestnuts are the first to turn | Autumn’s outliers | Gold and silver and bronze on the podium | Not hearing a human voice for the first three days | and then for another three | another fourteen | and twenty three after | and after | … | Ghosts are formed by habit, we do not notice that we’re dead | taking the books back to the library | Don Quixote and still at page 47 | becoming attached to a name | Old people sifting through the background | prototype phantoms | testing out the rings | somehow | inferno, limbo and paradise | become confused and leak together | to form a single, spiritual mush | My body has gone, gnawed by crabs off Toyama | I suppose the bones last a little longer? | Still keeping the diary, though with less and less to record | or perhaps only the same things | from last year | the windfall plums on the pavement at the corner | staining the flags black | though when they’re freshly fallen and broken open | their flesh is often a gelid amber | dust sticks in the smeared fruit | Also, I notice how slowly the very old woman moves | with her zimmer frame | as if inhabiting a film shot at different speeds | to the rest of us | a string of pearls on her breast | harder than she is | Familiar with repeated scents | with the first heat of spring | the first coolness in September | knowing these phenomena more deeply | and more acutely | with less time left to savour them | On a path at noon, out by the bay, a gory privilege | skin beginning to burn | and among my things | the meaning of life and a bottle of sand | and a cleft in the rock where a genie came out | and said “OBOCAMBABARRA!” | When you’ve used up all the known places, only elsewhere is left
