The cat run over and killed in the street
Came back to life and stood on its feet:

What the sun does to a flower,
Leaching its all-precious

We were having a picnic by the river.
We watched it land, their glistening ship
Fat as a Buick. The aliens were suntanned

Maybe the moon is made of ice, not cheese,
And that’s why it’s so frightening.

It looks like the china disk with the little lip
is filled with a watery sadness, twigs, and pebbles
and tiny blue flower petals (God, I have already begun

The friend hugs you a little longer than usual and winks.
“Andrew was not the Brother of the Lord,” he says,
and you wonder just who is the lord in this story. Who is

To chart the body’s pull away from text—
from Wuthering Heights to the Analects,
hoping you might call. He says he can’t

No one to give voice to stone flakes swarmed with decadent
Coptic scripts still read in Arabic primers nor attempt
to understand extremities and implements as human shapes

No way in or out—decades of discord
laid out in monasteries instead
of mystical tracts. The Ars Magna kept

Fish are swimming at ease—
         this is the happiness of fish.
                  But the sage kings are dead