the class simply transformed, a chain of satyrs
and maenads wound through my puerile lecture

It’s breakfast time. For a moment we pause
and taste a hunger like expectancy

They are nosing the cloudy walls
of the tank with their gaping mouths and flat
unspeculative eyes. Green and rose

The leopard cannot change his spots (they’re sewn
into his fur), yet he licks them through and through.

I have given you back to her,
locked the letters in a box.

A thin gold catch like a bee’s stinger—
    but there are no bees in winter—
lost from a necklace of honey-colored beads,

The bodies line this lake of suicides.
I visit the locked shed
Where lovers carve their summer oaths. Inside

It should be entered from the old quarter
At its center, the easiest part to get lost in.
—It happened to many of us here, as children:

Baseball is the purest sport, meaning
ballparks out in the heartland, mixing
fork balls and slurves, tapping

They return in desirable colors of the season,
whether casually or stupidly, to simplify the garden
of its sweetest shoots and tips, though I have set out