Once I'm sure there's no one else around I
climb, spider-silent, toward my treehouse, held like
a saucer on fingertips in the middle limbs of the oak.

Above the dog-eye-colored land
And town of San José
Of hot dog-fur and tin,

All bubbles travelling

In tubes, and being lights:  up down and around
 They were:  blue,  red and every man uncaught

                        —Dancer to Audience—

                           What works for me

             As in your flatland stillness you grow.

In the concrete cells of the hatchery
He nourished a dream of living
Under the ice, the long preparations

Its else, to them, lets logic spill through. Upend,
suspend what they no longer want to be real,
return them to credulity and they'll shill

First, you must collect the unfamiliar
pieces, this dither, toward a central hub.
Do not, though, mistake pretended order

I guess at last the wall became a kindness,
something, cut off as we were, we could stand
to believe in. Fourteen miles of thatch and thorn.

The first ending. And knowing it would end
I wanted another. Lover, summer,
pen with which to write it all down.

I enter a shop and see girls playing cards
the girls wear flaming red dresses
the kind you find in the theater