As if it’s important that summer remain 
here on the river’s bank, the tree sheds 
its fainter leaves: mauve

The frail smoke and virtues of the season blind 
us, almost with hands, and which of us can instruct 
the other now? I will have to find your body 

Their song is almost painful the way it
penetrates the air—above the haze and
level of the fields a thin line drawn. A

Flinging sticks and calling
to an amphibian black dog,
he clings, buoylike, though probably

Callow and amorphous, not gods
but adjectives flung at the sun
whose hot fibers protest their distance

Egon Schiele knew that he was two people
there was no doubt about it Romain Gary

wanted to be two people but he made a

Father, the bird writing writes bird’s nest soup —
a frail, disciplined structure, spun from its spittle
with bits of straw and dirt, then boiled with beaten eggs . . .

Near the beginning of his first journey
The great traveller (who was to suffer
Shipwreck, the loss of all his wealth, his slaves

Green beetles tick against the lighted windows. The crickets stay. I’m irritable on the phone, feel I’m supposed to entertain you, but I’ve had a stupid day and my only thought is full of complaint. You’re retired, and the delay on the long-distance line causes us to interrupt each other and to say with a harsh edge, “I can’t hear you; I’m sorry.”

I have walked these streets so often I could
forge the shadows of skyscrapers as they fall
to rest between the sculptured air of midtown.