Jelka’s profile decorates the doorway to my secret architecture.
Jelka’s profile chaffs at its own imposture, and the indirection
of its stardust infiltrates my polar brain: Welcome
to the material world where omens of the afterworld are
   leaked,
flowing like a black shirt. Mountains migrate into my head:
I was there to witness the vulgar radiance of her method,
dimly brooding under my Western lamp, accustomed, as I am,
to a miscellany of risible phantasms, fatigue never set in.
“Pungent nit, come in ! Comfort my belligerent lashes, help me
cast out my throes.” Jelka’s profile, O the asymmetry of it all!
She staggers now, and attempts to install a puzzle in her smile.
To the tune of Gylfi’s* mocking, this goddess of illusion
I shall never forget: all living is forgiving. Her profile.

Within Jelka’s radius, a Colonel is pulling a thorn
from a comrade’s melancholy frown.
There is undischarged thunder in the air. Skeptical,
Jelka looks around, spots a mathematician
playing marbles in the darkened parlor.
Several travelers appear indisposed and refuse
an offer to dinner. Jelka is stimulated
by these companions and walks around
feeling pregnant. Was Hirshvogel going North
or South? “Go after him when you are bigger,”
said the neighbor. The buttons, the buttonholes,
silver heels—brooch which consists of single
flaming beryl—whisk broom, please, carhop. The fête
by the tomb was a horrible idea. Jelka’s tongue
felt like suede. Her slippers, too, were antique, blessed things
making sure she “never fell off Mister Floor.”

Thirty olive trees are scribbling with crayons
on the bowler hats of eagles—ah, the train!
Jelka snatched up the idle boy, the viscous child saint, 
and cuddled him all the way to Illinois.
Wanderers. Whoosh, their luggage. They stand there,
pigheaded in Poisonville, bleeding lemonade
onto the drip-dry tarmac. They are traveling
under pseudonyms, their whole lives flickering
in corridors. Around five, the bonfires,
and they come out whipcracking out of their comas.
Lynxes are burrowing into their sleep-filled wagons.
And the boy with the mark of the beast…his
transitory gleam and headlong flight…Jelka follows
him flattening her endearments against the linoleum
shadow-stippled in the afternoon.

Jelka was lost forever, her costume found burnt
at daybreak. Could have been the city itself
just having a good time. I wish I knew
its name, brute nebulae. When her Collected Phonecalls
were published last Fall, she didn’t remember
making any of them. So. America roués.
She was a ghost at her own birthday party.
“Look at her,” said the Colonel, “she twiddles the dust-babies.
baleful and bluish, with fewer fingernails to grow.
Her life swings back and forth like a tongueless bell,
so far from anyone’s home.” I wrung his neck, and now
all of that old world is torn down. A coach arrives
to take her back to her inkspot, her comfortable
decomposing zones.

*In Norse mythology, Gylfi (Old Norse: [ˈɡylve]), Gylfe, Gylvi, or Gylve 
was the earliest recorded king in Scandinavia. The traditions on Gylfi deal 
with how he was tricked by the gods and his relations with the goddess Gefjon.