Wordless I watch
the faded evening glow, cloudlike
in the window of this late city train,

I drink
make Yuri cry
get scared, lose heart

I wonder if phlogiston theorists
were lovers, if it began when they
were set off, like the brown grass

Try to see graphite boil. Try
to imagine a hand, in a press,
in a cellar in Buenos Aires,

During a pop concert
Mr. Cogito reflects
on the aesthetics of noise

too many have seen
his son’s pierced hands
his ordinary skin

The priests have a problem
on the borderline of ethics and accounting

In the morning mice scamper
over the head
over the floor of the head

Though prudes once thought St. Gaudens’s golden-thighed
Diana too exposed to perch above
the old squat pile of Madison Square Garden,

The storms that make it into poems most often
leave something like disaster in their wake:
the wine-glass elms in pieces on the lawn,