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!”

Across the divider lines and cracked asphalts of America,
the cottonwood, poppy, paintbrush bloom, iris
and interstate litter live without a past or future,

We had been waiting on the porch at evening
in thought. Uneventful winds dropped down
from the green park of rock west of town—

came as a surprise, even beyond astonishment,
turned into a monument carved in rock
like Ozymandias, a hard fact. The self’s

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