It's Papa's coat she's wrapped in,
his old wool Lodenmantel, like a child

wrapped in a blanket of green leaves,

Could it be that Yeats was right?
This digital shorthand that will shake
the whole world up as the millennium ends

Subject and maker shed their names, and here
the Met displays that multinominal picture
on a brochure: self-portrait of the artist,

So many channels to choose from. Somewhere
in the high numbers blockheads trash-talk
during recess in the blue playground near school.

All night, wind out of the Pentlands
around the chimney flue made sounds
like thunder, and I lay thick

The light of the moment becoming a memory—
that was their subject: as if the present
could be haunted by its own nostalgia.

It haunts us, the misappropriated flesh,
be it Pelops' shoulder after Demeter's feast
or Adam's rib supporting Eve's new breasts,

Hath stored from the beginning
the spies and counter-worlds
within the foot, at the instep's

Beyond our seed-littered pond a small forest of bamboo grows wild.
Hear the wind-rustling like shaken paper? Bamboo.

Just as the lonely, wicked, wild and glad
eyes know and do not know by letting drop
in every detail of their daily dread