A ladder built into the exterior of a truck,
all anything does is confide, every morning
beginning now, decency its own kind
of constitution, each step onto a balcony or
from a cafe with little outdoor seating,
not counting the city. "What year
is that from," the mother says. "First century
A.D.," says her son. "But that's a hundred
years."
We proceed by pattern and anomaly, had
no money but lived above a bakery
and a florist, just-aged flowers free
in a trough. I liked how you called the street
I always take "the secret way," two fingers
held to a passing dog.
We go to the cinema merely
for the light, view of alleys
from a balcony, to be in
the world and it is mythic:
zinnia market in the church yard,
onions in mesh, daylit moon
a watermark on foreign currency
Zach Savich's first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. His second collection, Annulments, which these poems are from, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry and will be published in November 2010.