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,

      You keep poking at it
finger, drill, snout & awl
till you find yourself at the back

Far into fever, attached by cords to the soft-
clicking machines, he sleeps
in a bed in a room not his own.
People enter and pass like ghost-blown
fogs. He is a slow walk
with limbs that recently gave way.
He is part of the blue snowfall.

And what did you see, sequoia-quiet, looking out at black 
night. No islands, no kings or corridors of fury. 
But the districts where we were born, a few icy stars, 

I've heard the Resurrection never was,
that Christ was never buried, never rose—
(a caveat prescribed by Roman laws).

Our love has chosen its appropriate gesture
Which when viewed in the absence of all other gestures
Seems to spell the opposite of insignificant.

Here are the parrots, she says, which Mayor Washington,
the Mayor of Chicago,
in that apartment on Lake Michigan