The house
A frightened face
In the window of another house.

The branches shake, Jimmy, it rains in that trance;
Tuxedo in the colonnades asks after your breakfast.
A fire rises and falls in the house of Cadmus

With magazines that give the latest medical advice:
“Do patients want to think it was genetic?
Or luck; or what they drank, lounging in the sun?”

The things that I habitually say
are obvious. Why repeat them? Besides,
they are never what I meant to say.

Another cow was floating by us,
hilariously calm, bell-deep 
in milkweed and tansy. She looked 

Each of us waking to the window’s light
Has found the curtains changed, our pictures gone;
Our furniture has vanished in the night

He gazed into the air, searching for a word in my language.
I blinked. Across the pool a zephyr stirred, in my language.

Where was I? Where was he? Where he looked, remembering?

A cloche in plum,
In lion marigold,
Or mannish toques; a Borsalino. Bring

In a bookshelf at the dark livingroom’s end
stood the ten volumes of Journeys Through Bookland
which my parents bought when I was born.

The night refills itself.
Limestone drops to the sea
that varies blue all day