I take the dusty yearbook off the shelf
and scan the fledgling, mostly white, male faces:
a foreign country, but the aging self

 I tried, and each attempt was a fiasco. 
I yearned, but every love of mine was wrong. 
I needed, and the shame was overwhelming. 

The Museum of Modern Art isn’t hungry
Each wall is perfection
Leger says hello to Picasso

Today I wished without mercy
in the bloodless nations of the mind
that a city had gone down with you

The sparrows drop to my plate, their
tiny drumsticks clamped to their sides

He gave me a spruce lap desk
for writing in bed that Christmas.
It was rubbed into fragrance with oil of almond

as if they’d given themselves a tree, a sky
full of companions, song
that can travel.

Our friends die with us
    and the sky too
         in huge swatches, and lakes, and places

Reading? Morning.
Reading morning and a sky like the olive.

With a great scuffle,
the meeting adjourned.
Calm turned to storm.