For public appearances, for the crowds
Who expected perfection, he managed,
Take after take, to mimic the sound

The congregation dances perfect golden reels
redolent of sex amid the Sunday chimes;
how sweet, how… symmetrical it all is—everything else.

On a street in a city a thousand miles inland
a woman I'd never met grabbed me by the shoulders
and shook me and shook me and shouted

At first she is only mildly annoyed: the car
won't start, it's happened before. She'll phone
her husband—what is his name?—at his office,

it lay in my palm soft and trembled
as a new bird and i thought about
authority and how it always insisted

When I was a young man
chasing girls I was so
hot to get into them I

So I’ll speak ill of the dead. A was crooked,
planting the small left finger of the raccoon in the upholstery
before he sold the car. B made certain to point out Celia’s

Gentlest hull of bond, tendons that bear
to work a gait, sentiment that brought you here:
at the window in the dark, speaking tongues

What he had said came back to him.
Sectioned seat, sectioned seat.
The lift caught wind and swayed him in.

I wanted the gigando set in this corner here,
the 36 incher under the row of cornapples
hung just as the greasy greasy grannies done.