Today’s subject is an architecture of cards,
laminate, cool, telling no fortunes. It’s
the world reduced to a series of integers

Archaeologist of the aesthetic, perception’s rhapsode;
perpetual bachelor, father by default leaving heirs
but no offspring; elliptical ascetic sideswept by eros,

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

Mother in champagne-colored dress,
      neckline with navy-blue crenelles,

It looks like the china disk with the little lip
is filled with a watery sadness, twigs, and pebbles
and tiny blue flower petals (God, I have already begun

Gesturing toward the master bedroom suite,
"Solid cherry wood!" Mother said grandly.

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,