Oh I have felt these same 
yearnings in myself— 
the tiny dark and yellow 

The gravid gecko lies
aslant a stalk of banana, 
just a tilde over

The children play at the Luxembourg fountain.
Their small ships catching wind and sail out and come round again.

Beneath a sky whose hardened violets
still chase a warm front’s temperatures along,
the mockingbird and mourning dove create

So complete, the imago of consciousness,

the mosquito’s predatory whine
beauties itself in the clothing of childhood.

At the end of October a mallard
came down
                to the lake’s edge

Along the rented sands of New York bight
used bandages and needles wash ashore.
The summer islanders are in a roar,
reduced to August in a living hell

The sunlight was like wire on the water,
that morning the ghost ship drove upriver.
The only witness was a Jersey cow.

The palms looked wary even in broad afternoon,
thin women in fancy ribbed hats.
Beyond them the hooded sweep of the St. Johns

Nothing in the nothing before dawn
but the bent screak of a crow,
hedges long naked of birds.