A tiny creature moves
through the tide pool, holding up
its little fortress foretelling

Three hot-eyed kids hard on a fix’s heels.
Enraged that the cash he had on him was small,
Did in James Edmondson, famed vaudeville’s

      Anything but rotten, such flowers are ill 
named, remaining exempt from the compost fate 
      by a decorum of fatigue, keeping still 

The breaking of things can look like an origination
But then reveal itself, through lights shimmering in fragments 
Of smashed glass, as having occurred too late to have given

In a bookshelf at the dark livingroom’s end
stood the ten volumes of Journeys Through Bookland
which my parents bought when I was born.

I look round the cluttered
icons of your room:
quilt, photo, stuffed bird.

Blind bow spirit,

                           my mother,

                                               Beatrice

Forgotten, shabby and long time abandoned
          in stubbled fur, with broken
teeth like toggles, the old gods are leaving.

Now coming up on scherzo,
simulated situation based on big, big trouble.
Word good as broken-down bond,

                        —Dancer to Audience—

                           What works for me

             As in your flatland stillness you grow.