We decided to stop drinking and spend Sunday at the zoo. It was going nicely until she worked herself up over the observation that it was a horrible thing to cage the animals.

He's the camera, I'm the pose. In this photograph I am
happy.
                                •

Driving out to Long Island over the Williamsburg Bridge
I spot the young white men on the rooftop.
There’s a bottleneck as the ribbons of feeder lanes
Merge, and the boys on the roof laugh, one of them
Cradles a mock rifle, another cocks his thumb and forefinger
Into a pistol—the way of cowboys and Indians, the way of kids,

Mind-potent men in their mastery,
     Flowers and floaters,
Prey and pray, pretenders to the real,

Stay where ideas are underground.
The pure essence is a green willow slip.
As a snake slumbering under the mountains.

Where I begin is no beginning; 
Except I shall make one tomorrow, 
Fire myself out north and west, 

Classified as a modern calamity,
the salamander hibernates all winter
in the hollow of a tree

How formal and polite,
How grave they look, burdened with earnest thoughts,
In all these set-up sepia stills,

Junked hypodermics made it hard to walk
along the Tiber by the deserted, grand
sandstone embankment of the temple block.

I think you would understand
my craft of writing, how it makes of me
your king and creature in this no-man’s-land
of the moment;