A plant grew quietly on the windowsill, and everybody
knew it was a good soldier and they nodded hello

They left, and they looked, but they never did find that pack of
cigarettes.

  We smile toward this Countess of Pembroke
with her delicate lips and translation

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

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

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

I glow with warmth.
I smile. I think
this person is cordial,

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