The birds with fiery plumage perched
like epaulets on the general's statue

And fountains where girls sun their legs
dipping their toes in the cool ripples

the instant the sky wakes my eyes are shut I’m listening to the rainfall huh 
 huh huh listening to half a lifetime of rainfall isn’t romantic
the sound of rainfall approaching unites with the sound of a solitary car

an ant dies, and no one mourns
a bird dies, and no one mourns if it isn’t a crested ibis
a monkey dies, and monkeys mourn

it’s about time the stars & stripes & soda water start making love

it was all so strange and frightening that I wept for quite some time crying like I’d never cried before

That you made love
on an office desk
on the seventeenth floor

Stretch our hearts ample as a yawn,
so we might accommodate the double-
wide trailer of our neighbors’ grief

“Now, I must tell you of our grandeur,”
she’d written. “We are going to have
a Turkey!!! carpet in the dining room . . .

Rainstorms that blacken like a headache
where mosses thicken, and the mornings
smell of jonquils, the stillness

the thing I hankered after was no
rite but a foundation, the bedrock