Drums. Cannon. Punishing rain. Lightning
          has roused the auto-theft alarms
on Avenue Beaumarchais to an eerie siren-

Our plane has already been de-iced
but sleet comes over the wings again like a coating of dust
on the wide leaves of a rubber plant—

“One wearies of looking for all that’s not there
      in Monet, in the brainless shimmer, the whirl
   of his vast ambition, to be absorbed in the airy

Our text, class, is chaos. We are its authors. These words,
our illustration, are random and senseless, until the rules
to reveal their sense are revealed, or invented, like the laws of cells,

He dyed the air with dripping joints of beef,
chewed up blueprints and spilled out designs
for warehouses, trains, jails, wasting the night

Many fish in those murky ocean caves
of Mexico, Brazil, Croatia, Oman

have no eyes.
Though in the streams outside—

We circle her flaking house, rehearsing our bleak
themes (the life or the work, marriage or betrayal).

You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed
if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific
at dawn, running for miles over the quick

Now the blue fruit
And frosty weeds decay;
Now, October’s root

We woke together, arm in arm,
    Deep in the summer loft,
Over the sleeve of ravelled sill