You dismiss the tiny, protesting fraction
back home, claim you've learned a nation

There are certain words—ecstasy, abandon,
surrender—we can wait all our lives,
sometimes,

Naturally, the preference is for
victory, not persistence
which, like fire if not put out,

June is a migraine above the eyes,
Strict auras and yellow blots,
                                                green screen and tunnel vision,

She bought it because her baseball player didn't want her to,
because her playwright and her President and her Attorney
General disapproved. You're a star, they said—the one

A trick of October light
made festive the trek we
took to the empty beach,

Deirdre was almost ebony. She washed your boxers
and folded them neatly inside your backpack.
When I came home from the Cape, you'd painted our bedroom

Hopper never painted this, but here
on a snaky path his vision lingers:

Three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces

Imagine starting with that option
(a deistic turn of faith, or generosity?)
each lens minutely tinted a petition-

Voice
from the grain

of the forest bought