Winter. Late January
afternoon. Night falls fast.
You think I should know this

Ferns here ferns there
I dream of my newest friends                         
who soon subside    

That man over there 
looking sidelong 
as you sidelong 

The way of free things unmatched she moved
expert of love but love more subtly tuned
than a watcher would expect from naive distance

Something about what matters
   Breathes in the twilight blushing
         Everything here on the piers.

It’s the willed trick of concentration
  that makes of these heat-heavy
bogged declivities —the graves of

He looked beneath the rock to find the god
that he had hidden there—that's Oscar
Wilde on Wordsworth's Sublime,

Hunkered, totally

spaced, in the half-open door of the fridge
with my trifocals fogging, scanning the five

  No sleep for either of us on the flight to
Maine and then to Gatwick. From the train, backyard
allotments and cooperatives, the city hardly

  Left to itself, setting is the chance that
something good might happen. A highway runs the
length of the peninsula. The suburbs overlap.