Somewhere over there the lawyer with a yellowish leaf in his hair;

somewhere out  of sight a swallow soaring away from our dog-nose weather;

elsewhere the stable-hand for an equestrian team; elsewhere

the bodhisattva stretching by the river or the sleepwalking knife-thrower,

the dubious bridegroom or the cosmetic dentist or the smiling steamfitter;

otherwise the town TB doctor, a whoreson of the adamantine

as he comes by law, a doctor come to a cold apartment

for an old man’s cough; otherwise the contented singer of karaoke,

or the anti-semite & his pyramid scheme; otherwise, in a soaking tub, a tenured

gnostic or a tan Micawber; otherwise Joey Gallo in Umberto’s clam bar;

or in Berlin, at the Atelier Jacobi, Lotte Jacobi; elsewhere

the Secretary of Defense, & the wolfhound sent down to retire

him, a conductor of souls; elsewhere the young girl who’ll swim the length

of a warm pond (because her guardian naps), or a policeman eating

beer-battered shrimp; somewhere else what used to be called an industrialist;

and a nun about to go over the wall; & a judge sowing an apple seed;

elsewise, at an auction dock, a bayman unloading the white & gray

bushel-baskets of littlenecks & cherrystones, or the Irish wholesaler

with his herring & whitebait, glistening grey & pink eels on chipped ice,

the sawdust under his feet wet with blood; elsewhere a clerk

at a lighting outlet; otherwise someone steered by brighter devices;

someone trimming his sideburns; a settler; a currency trader; a choral director;

elsewise the rooster who stunned Ophelia, a rooster with patten-leather

boots, shoes like clement black candles; otherwise Ophelia; or the Moroccan boy

and his breakfast of hardboiled eggs, aboard the bus from Tetuan to Fez

a Berber who wiped his mouth on his sleeve; or a dumbfounded skeptic

or a vixen or a lotus-eater or a grandmother or an unbaptized doorman—

all those other lives & destinations that might have been mine, but weren’t—

because there are two kinds of distance between us—towards, & away.