While others were discussing
the styles of metopes,
I lay down in the Temple of Zeus

I could be a statue or a pine tree.
The love-canceling hours are gone.
There is no ick factor.

The tent men arrived bearing sledgehammers
and were young enough to be my sons.  
After rolling out the canvas, they drove rods 

It’s nice to have a lake to love me,
that can see under all my disguises—
where there is only animal survival

I’m tired of life and its troubles.
Whoever lives as long as I have or will
grows weary: it’s inevitable.

 How could I not have taken him home:
his eyes shone a gentian blue,
his name was Jesus, and I found him alone

If it’s spring in the city, have the marchers,
each one with a shrieking whistle, short-circuited the streets,
their cause as grave as the dirty cabs growling at their feet?

I was looking 
for the two 
black men

It was premonitions that kept us restless
the night before, visions of a gemlike lagoon
we’d push off into, the slim canoe

Such is the way with monumental things:
to make us see and wonder.
The unreserved calm of the place