By silence he meant it's bad enough
To squander words on paper. Don't waste them.
Along with your breath, on air. By exile

Every year the flowers come back in the same order:
                     first the crocus
like all the teenage girls on the block deciding

Airborne it's like a dream. It's dreamy. It's for
all the world like something
ants have made, something gigantic fomented

Were I there, leaning against a London building's
filthy stonework, gazing by chance into a street
at the moment of this carriage's transit

The sunlight was like wire on the water,
that morning the ghost ship drove upriver.
The only witness was a Jersey cow.

I can bang at the lyre, but make it sing?
Each time the muse whistles through my spine,
she numbs like a drug, and I nod

For makers of elaborated worlds, adorned and peopled by the creatures and the furniture of their inventions. For those who live as if the way things are were not enough and mean, by their words, to do something about it. For those who would protect the first beloved from the fresh reality of the second. For fabricators of plausible excuses that will save

When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,
one longs to hear the cry "Hygrometer!
Fresh hygrometer for sale!" Yes, and when the fair

The surgeon Celsus, at the time of Christ,
Said the right hand should operate
On the left eye, the left hand should invade

Port with the tossed deck, whipping
Sheep-bends between the coiled lines.
We lean. Our faith in bracing and ballast.