In the world inside the world, 
inside the war inside the egg 
inside the sea, on a bench at the edge 
of the lake, demi-baguette drooping from his coat 
and a mallet in his pocket for chiseling 
his mind’s next eye, he dreams a tiny countryside, 
a topaz duckling, a miniature golden track, 

a bitsy goat in a red scarf riding in a train car
just like a lady, the single jade tulip, 
a silvered pussy willow, snowdrops of amethyst 
poking out of the earth. All of it, gone, 
Merde. I am dying, he thought, 
tearing off a bit of baguette and feeding it 
to the sleepy mallards at his feet. O shabby heart.  
Years ago, he kneeled before the tzarina,

his hand trembling as she opened the first orb. 
Inside, a yolk of gold.  
Inside the yolk, a sleigh. 
Inside the sleigh, an agate crown, 
nestled the way he had just in that moment
nestled himself to her happiness; a cameo 
wearing a cameo inside a cameo. 
Every spring, another: the bejeweled dancer 

set in mid-leap, tutu of rose quartz blooming from the pink shank 
of her thigh as she glinted at herself in a mirror the size of a pearl, 
the carousel egg, horses spinning around pea-sized sepia portraits
of the royal family, turning and turning,
closing away from his hands forever.
Then came the steel boots, the bolts, the shattered marble—
his workshop a shambles, his eggs hollow tombs, 
his heart blown clean with steam as the last train pulled him west.
Now he is whispering Verdi to the four-o-clocks again,

their mechanical petals tilted toward his voice
the way he once tilted upward
as she sweetened his cheek with a kiss
she’d fastened to a leaf and floated down to his face,
which he kept and pressed to his eyes like gelt, remembering.  
Here, moths boil against lamplight
and his heart pumps thin and watery beneath his misbuttoned shirt
as he miters an elegy to the companion of dark tubers
beneath the audience of sky. Violetta! Violetta!  
It wasn’t the quail that he missed most, 
fed to him by the palace servants, or the partridges and doves
licked clean of their feathers and stuffed with dates and sugared plums,
the silvery sturgeon plated with its span of fins, 
or the warm hearth licking the grouse filled with currants, the silk sheets;
not the quiver of Turkish rose jellies on tiny spoons 
that jellied in his throat when she entered the room—

no, it was the dust that would rise up in the shop after soldering,
the light that poured through the windows out into the snowdrifts, 
the way bird cherries flowered the city in the warm wind
and the petals would stick in her hair, that moment 
in spring when he began to grow the next tiny world, 
its doorposts and its ice slides, 
its glockenspiels and its lilacs, the madness 

that rose inside him as he watched her tug at the velvet, 
unlocking his new little planet—
he would have cracked his own sternum
if his heart had been the rubied surprise inside.  At the edge of this alien lake, 
the hens of his hands lay only pebbles.  
O shale heart  Here, he was the last man ever, 
tzar of himself, king of rubble, 
the tail of a kite escaping
from its cheap plaster shell,
fluttering up through the chestry oaks, 
through the soot and haze and into the coppery light.