Two Women

Something was inflicted.
He was looking.
The tiny cuts rained down.
He wore an air of soiled gravity.
Like a man on a childs train.

And yet as he lay on the tracks
as per novelistic instruction
(German steel; crows pecking, biding it)
he awoke less visibly severed than he ought.
Pearly love bites by the dozen was all.

He lay spanning and surveying
(with the translator's detachment)
the undercarriage and its skittering
high gauge diagram, mosaic of pistons,
drippings. And through the braying

planks he viewed a scrim
of scarved weepers gone shuttling by.
Warm down there beneath the free-floating canopy.
Wafts of mother's bodily perfume,
Of dog hair.