The little candles which dot the rosette-bedecked
Sheetcake sway so demurely that the happy
Huffing and puffing comes as a cosmic surprise,

Who’d known about soybean stew or what
A camshaft did or how asparagus grew?
Even the much-mowed grass was new to those

Who will meet her?
sitting ahead of me,
her face a crushed girlskin,

 Stale hunk
Left for us
On a plate

The hundred shadows of the evergreens.
The refracted
strands of the ripples:

Sweat lingering in broadcloth over soap,
the first man’s smell I smelled belonged to you.
Couldn’t look at myself. I trust you saw my taupe

When I close a letter
with “Cordially,” I
blush with shame.

I wonder if anything really needs to be revived.
Mad magazine should probably be dead by 1984
rather than: $2.50 CHEAP. It’s difficult

Sudden cold or the sudden sense of having been cold for a long time 
He said he was getting back some things that had been lost like what  
Love oh great looking out across the river he wouldn’t meet my eyes either 

Dogs skulk, clouds moil and froth, humans
begin to cook—butter, a blue waver of flame,
chopped onions. A styptic rain stings grit and soot