These good New Yorkers bent low over books
deserve a Paradise of softer chairs
and sleep, their heads against that fringed and white

Above, the red clay cliff, and above that,
a fringe of scrub grass and the overall sky.
Propped against great stones, boulders with ledges

When the high-pitched sounds of the August continuo
circulated like breezes through the immovable heat,
time was a single leaf drifting upwards, then down.

I have dreamt a dream of fulfillment, of freedom:
she was an old woman, with a face like the moon,
first full with reflection, then new and dark, and then

Our text, class, is chaos. We are its authors. These words,
our illustration, are random and senseless, until the rules
to reveal their sense are revealed, or invented, like the laws of cells,

Drums. Cannon. Punishing rain. Lightning
          has roused the auto-theft alarms
on Avenue Beaumarchais to an eerie siren-

“One wearies of looking for all that’s not there
      in Monet, in the brainless shimmer, the whirl
   of his vast ambition, to be absorbed in the airy

You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed
if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific
at dawn, running for miles over the quick

So much about the place was lies.
The marble walls that were wood.
The stone grillwork, like coral.

Afterwards I said the palm tree was like a snake
coiling around the delicate outdoor bannister
but Janette said like a swan courting a swan.