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.

The sea’s tedious soliloquies
drone and repeat
against the rinky-dink dock

Old wolf, I said,
leave a tatter
for my family:

In old movies they searched the mummy’s tomb
with flashlights, on tiptoe—as if the dead
were listening, numbered the catacombs

Like sandbox toys abandoned in mid-play
when mothers finally call the children home,
cars, trucks, and tanks lie strewn along the highway,

Inside the picture it is 1903—late spring or early summer.
The three women sit on the front porch steps,
a potted fern to their right on the middle stair,

This quill is a wand;
I wave it about

All is flux.
The wet wars against the dry,
The cold against the hot,

While the rain comes pouring down,
Chekhov, in his white peaked hunting cap,
And prone beside a rick of hay, surveys

A sort of cypress reached
Halfway up the longer window;
I came to live here, all the same.