From Vienna it’s picture-postcard all the way.
Tell me, was ever such a land at ease!
The fat farms glistening, the polished pigs.

The river icy in the wind.
Jersey glinting from night’s amalgam. Neon shines
from the luminous, frosted window.

A Narrator will read the numbers and text aloud starting with this statement:

1. Three spotlighted women stand stage center on an otherwise dark stage. Two of them elegantly dressed in black, the third naked. All are white-haired, in their fifties or older.

. . . and the curtain rose in that theatre so long ago
and the music is playing
the first song I fell in

How strange to see their faces start to worry
Into ours, and after all those years
We spent pretending we had made a life

To take advantage of the January thaw, I walk
uptown to savor the grapefruits and green
peppers in the winter light, then, returning, turn

In the ninth grade I met a fantastic number of times
with Cookie Harris in the woods . . . Under the pretense
of going over our Algebra notes, given the pressure

Each evening now the ash blue flame
swept from my fingertips
climbing its gas ladder up the flue

Possible to believe in a bearable sort of life
in a white room in one of the tidy anonymous streets
that flash by the elevated subway. Picture it:

What if I told you the truth? What if I could?
The nuptial trek of the bower apes in May:
At night in the mountain meadow their clucking cries,