With a shriek gulls fled across a black sky,
all of us under the pier were silent,
my blood ached from waiting, then we resumed.

I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass

On this tenth day of the year, I play Stravinsky
and sip vodka from a paper cup, taking in the view.
Tendrils twining, leaves rippling, guts absorbing nutrients,

Naked but for dainty shoes, garter
and a ribbon in her long red hair,
she takes him in the way history takes us in:

Waiting for a deceased friend’s cat to die
is almost unbearable. “This is where you live now,”
I explain. “Please stop crying.” But he is like a widower 

In the dream,
a priest said
it was time

Eating a sugar sandwich, I sit at the kitchen table
admiring the geraniums outside the window,
their big heads as American as Martha Washington.

My house is mine:
the choice of menu,
the radio and television,

Precisely this
        afflicts the plagiarist,
or something like

I sit on the dock for a haircut and watch
as summer spreads out, relieving the general,
indiscriminate gray, like a mouthful of gin