Drums. Cannon. Punishing rain. Lightning
          has roused the auto-theft alarms
on Avenue Beaumarchais to an eerie siren-

“One wearies of looking for all that’s not there
      in Monet, in the brainless shimmer, the whirl
   of his vast ambition, to be absorbed in the airy

You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed
if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific
at dawn, running for miles over the quick

So much about the place was lies.
The marble walls that were wood.
The stone grillwork, like coral.

Afterwards I said the palm tree was like a snake
coiling around the delicate outdoor bannister
but Janette said like a swan courting a swan.

Ellen and I Go Back—at least as far
as her pre-op days when she was still a man
and minced each midnight through the local bar.

Never was there a time when I did not lead him,
when I did not feel his hand upon my shoulder.

May we tinker with nature, define &
adopt, adjust her procedures, till
we can make a nature

Harassed with inquiry, I
waited up by a scale-flaked
boulder in a willow glen,

My poems, if poems
other than casual
entrances into systems, are