My dear, you moved so rapidly through my life
I see you as a ghostly blur;
You are the subject, I the ornament

Saturday noon: the morning of the mind 
Moves through a mist to breakfast: damp from sleep, 
Rustic and rude, the partial self comes down 

At seventeen I’ve come to read a poem
At Princeton. Now my young hosts inquire
If I would like to meet Professor Einstein.
But I’m too conscious I have nothing to say

In that high thin sun, in that provincial winter,
surely Madeleine
                          —et vous, Madame, mère bien-aimée

Child-crafted clouds, all sheen and fleece and curlicues,
as a girl, with her tongue in her teeth, would have made them,
the point of her crayon squashed against the page.

How does one know an El Greco?
I can't say, but I just know
something's always out

Here I am       I’ve been watching the animals
              I watch them in the afternoon
that seems to drop my being       lower into time

bullfrogs singing from the long grasses
              horses captured in a video
              Wild is a horse’s word       They are running

At the Hotel Oblivion, Airport Drive
  Mezzanine, Conference Center B

The big claw takes its angle
and drives down hard,
shivering Kezar’s concrete bleachers

I am, Madam., no beggar, but a peddler of dreams,
Purveyor of the Gospel of Beauty, Reciter of Rhymes . . .

And they regarded him from the shadows of their porches,