A girl reclining by an open window
I do not say this was
the only thing one saw that day.

Things

Things, no matter what they are.
Can get out of control.

Leona heard the engines again, the great
cranes outside her window breaking up the old history,
the bulldozers striking layers of rock that ran

The things that I habitually say
are obvious. Why repeat them? Besides,
they are never what I meant to say.

Dead Heat

For years the thought of you scorched my eyeballs
Now all is well under the scalding sun.

1.
Technically it was liquid asphalt:
MC, RC, or 85/100—
nothing very far removed

1. I perceived myself falling in love
in bits and pieces in black and white.
On page 20 she wore a floral robe

Dream, philosophy, of the little
Hudson Valley town of Cold
Spring (there’s an unexpected place)

Edgar Pesach, the obituary writer, is on the roof of the Lincoln Plaza
Apartments. It is a deep autumn Sukkoth night.
The Philharmonic plays tonight—Boccherini, or Brahms?

The word for childish greed
in Armenian is the same
as for an eye with a hole.