It was deja vu all over again.

I know this town like the back of my head.

People who live in glass houses are worth two in the bush.

 Gesturing toward the master bedroom suite,
"Solid cherry wood!" Mother said grandly.
Two bureaus, two mirrors, four-poster bed,

Abras, augers, arks and angel wings,

bubbles, bittium,
baby's ears,

I never liked the World Trade Center.
When it went up I talked it down
as did many other New Yorkers.

You're crazy if you called this an affair.
We slept together, and you made me come.
No big deal. You've got a lot of strange

Academia 1994: these dead white males
I've been hauling about in this brick of a box of a book
called Western Civilization—Homer, Plato, Melville,

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,