He calls the scissors “neighbors,”
they have lived next to him for twenty years.

You knew how things open,
a flower, a jail, an eye
and at the very last, a hand.

It was raining during her lunch
hour and to keep dry she went
into one of those shabby little

Sometimes when I am working
In the forest clearing brush from

Like doe-skin mittens, mottled marigold
And pinned up by the roadside on display,

It didn’t want your sympathy and had no need
Of affection, the hot breath of your infatuate regard.

Again the time has come to take our morning walk.
Look beneath the heavy cedars, little dear:

Not smoke but the shades of smoke, and not cloud-work
but the gray and smoke-green densities of clouds—

Two old men, father-in-law and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, 
    are staying by Canal Grande 
together with the agitate woman who is married to King Midas 

Although it is noon or roughly so, the church below is
   positioned like an hour hand 
at eleven o’clock,