Now life shall flow around me, colorful,
sensitive, unmeaning. This emptiness

The animals were captivated.
We want the soil, they said.

Something hopeful is about to happen,
the shepherd informed. The last train

Something terrible has happened
but I don’t know what. The letter
that arrived this morning will say no more

One only needs to give the ocean some thought and it becomes describable as a street of houses:

So all this talk, since Whistler,
about the primacy and purity of
Form is balderdash.

I am being forcibly retained in the land of no repute. Here all the chiefs of staff are too punch drunk to drop bombs on anyone. Liberation is passé for all except a few debutantes who have put their ostrich feathers in mothballs.

You don’t have to worry.
Your secrets are safe with me.
Your secret of how you construct a beautiful necklace from rainwater.

The point of clothes was line,
a shallow fall of cotton over childish hips
or a coat ruled sharp, shoulder to hem

                I want to tell you, it has nothing to do with trees or luck, that the last carnations crumbling in the gutter, the float stripped down by the rain, even the drum major and the fireman, lifting their beers to the moon, are part of some other show, some other season, which the barkers have never known.