He gets back in the car, resting a plastic tray of nachos on his jeans. I smell the salt, the corn, the nacho cheese, its under-smell of plastic, the way his hair smells when he hasn’t washed it in a few days, gasoline.

                                              twig stick A line of trees hard   branches above the roofs 

                 the boats
        to illustrate
the drift of light, shifting

Homer playing
         violin
as he could have,

That’s love for you, a terror so white 
it cleaves the bones.

Who can't but love a soldier wearing mums
In his helmet? A colossal private
Produced a flask of something and toasted

Why I hate to be up in the air,
dangling in a car on a wire strung between two alps
above the village of Chamonix,

I didn’t know there could be so many silences
listening in on our conversation,
or having their own conversations

Tonight I saw Dustin Hoffman
walking down Lexington Avenue.
He lives on 61st Street

Tuned to 104.6 on the FM
dial, the boom box purrs Golden
Oldies I jerk awake to. You
turn beside me, to me, but turning,