As one who has been homesick for his town 
And then returns, expecting some gay tune,
Your hear a beggar sing a mournful rhyme

I was apprenticed young,
    A shut-in with no sense
    Of sunlight or clear sky

The day was bright and warm. We went to swim 
Up at the Dolder’s big expensive pool. 
That afternoon we saw a strange old woman 

Summer is never

Just where my long road started out, it ends.
I stand alone and see my childhood town 
Calling its kids and saying goodnight to friends. 

Our mittened hands upon the snow-capped stone,
we stood and watched what once was river zag
a black and crazy trickle through the ice.

I

He threw his bat down third and seized the pen:
“My words will make the ages better men!”

Today's subject is an architecture of cards,
laminate, cool, telling no fortunes. It's
the world reduced to a series of integers
plus a face or two, a synthetic temple

You can be a mother who knows a god,
And you can ask him for magic armor,
A shield the width of Saturn’s widest rings,

If, in depicting the angels, I cannot
avoid something, as well, of what
the river that day cast before me,
the musculature of the rowers’ arms,