A snowstorm appears on radar maps

yet no snow falls on the city

plows are dispatched

trucks salt the streets

and the planets line up

as they do once a millennium

in a year when so many you knew

and loved have been returned to the earth

or consumed by fire

transformed by laws (however flawed)

that Lucretius recorded so carefully

including those murkier ones

that apply to the spirit

which he claimed was neither birthless nor deathless

when he attempted to chronicle

its flight from the body

the evanescent ribbon it trails

to the edge of the universe

(a month’s journey by his calculation)

where an orchestra of lost souls 

performs its angry music that some nights 

on Earth is mistaken for thunder

Maya Cortina martyred in Wichita

Kansas on All Souls Eve 1950

by a costumed mob

skeletons werewolves clowns

beating her to death

while two policemen or men

dressed as policemen watched

from a darkened doorway

For weeks the newspapers

had been blaring warnings

about the Yellow Peril

the fact that no sooner

was the Empire of Japan vanquished

than the People's Republic of China

annexed Tibet and asserted

its hegemony over Indochina

Born and raised on Bali

widowed at twenty-two by a G.I.

killed on Guadalcanal

Maya was an actress who that night

played one of the schoolgirls

in kimono and obi

in a performance of The Mikado

after which to save bus fare

she chose to walk home

still in costume beneath her coat

In Sardinia and all the world

there is only one green lighthouse

looming against a green sky

and only one key to unlock its door.

The widow gave it to me

when she moored her boat

and left me on the beach below.

I followed a winding trail up the cliff

to the lighthouse and climbed

the stairs to the lantern

and through the salt-flecked glass

watched the widow sail back

to her island of thorns

the stone house

in which she would snuff her candle

just as the great lamp came to life

flashing across the cropped waves

guiding ships to shore

and drowning me in light.