Today's subject is an architecture of cards,
laminate, cool, telling no fortunes. It's
the world reduced to a series of integers
plus a face or two, a synthetic temple

came as a surprise, even beyond astonishment,
turned into a monument carved in rock
like Ozymandias, a hard fact. The self’s

We had been waiting on the porch at evening
in thought. Uneventful winds dropped down
from the green park of rock west of town—

Across the divider lines and cracked asphalts of America,
the cottonwood, poppy, paintbrush bloom, iris
and interstate litter live without a past or future,