Your glassy wind breaks on a shoutless shore and stirs around
                                                                                                the rose.

I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
   My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
         move flatly out to sock you in the eye.

All day I measure noses.
People are brought before me.
My brass calipers never lie.

My father? He was into shoes.
But also into pins and needles,
pots and pans: a five-and-ten,

Each has a foot-square paper napkin stuck
to the headrest: a bow to budget travelers' sensibilities.
Too bad each square evokes a paper toilet seat:

It's not as simple as rhyming “mud” and “blood”
   as Owen did and does (“I, too, saw God through mud”)
   in his “Apologia.”

I walk along the shore.
Wind's salt tongue licks my face.
And see—beyond the swells

Sublimation, a new version of piety.
Hovers the paint and gets her going.
Everything drifts, a barely heard sigh is the

You hire a guide. See several waterfalls,
a dock for a boat, and, indeed, a boat.
You rock to a shore where bats rise as gulls.