Letter from Austerlitz

Agate, ivory. Without

alliance, I was told, we

would not fill the air

with our difficult musics.

The audience, then, does

not ever change—

always a mother, and shame,

and absent a worthwhile father.

So I came to know

what it meant to go

alone beneath the full

buck moon, to scratch

a phrase like  fragments

are the only form he trusts

onto the page, but this is a letter,

and maybe one of the only places

I will write it down: suddenly I grew

uncomfortable to be loved and broken

to be loved less than the other