She didn't like him: long nose baits,
Voice patient yet overbearing (a voice
Meant for a world of women-as-children).
He'd expect a yielding kiss if not more.

The train swayed past cropped fields,
Barking collies, abandoned gas works, cows.
Brown bungalows with little gardens

The log-crammed trucks smash the yielding air,
Whine like leviathan gnats.

 

Smashing sticks of gum till her jaw smarts,
Looking for something out there to look at,

The smothering heat of a July night
Squats in a second floor bedroom
And doesn’t move despite the desk fan’s

Warm abstraction, glimmer and fruit
Of progress, hope and comfortable psychology
We forgive the promises of love, drugs and dieting

Détente did not augur a new era
For this unmapped sideshow taking place
On a dirt road off another dirt road.

She knows that the room will dance in that earnest
Way that rooms dance. The building will kick in too

It was a summer for sitting naked in
The backyard, the deep drizzle deploying the young
As an aspect of the lately-discovered elemental.

Cynical millenarian, I like
You in this shot, posed without
Insignia or emblems,

Any tourist will tell you:
Envisioning is our medicine.
I, too, hope to see what I can’t see.

Bemusement was the better part of sanity,
And sanity was your glance past the surly
Occasion to the sheer morning or moment

We were advertising our urge for life
To ourselves and anyone else who might
Have noticed

Because we use the same words
Does not mean we have the same eyes.

We cannot live there and wouldn’t want to
But cherish it as a moral charm.