Shall I come to see
plum blossoms in every stream
and wet my sleeves

One thing I think everyone is nostalgic for, though perhaps without being able to articulate it, is a time when literature would begin a little less abruptly, without a lot of facts about cracker-named people before you’re told who they are or why they’re there, like so many dog-wagging tails or a pair of narrating lips set chronicling by one who imagined that a tone of

a mythology begins with a question like who are we, where are we, what is red, why paint, why me, lord, why? a person who knows all the answers can only borrow a mythology like i’m king midas or i’m god. 

Between laps the sun drops
through its arc, lurching
like the clock hand
I secretly watched

All night I dreamed of ornate fountains,
water sprayed in intricate designs
like liquid lace or the traceries of Gothic

Through leaded windowpanes the light pours down
less on the holy figures than on objects
waiting to be used that tell the story:

An evening, sad like snow in a landscape
(late Vermeer, no signature, no date
in an old man's hand). In the center

There will be spiders the size of your ears, drinks
that will make you stupid, matches you'll long
to strike; there will be mop-ups the size of Rhode Island.

The Marchioness went out at five o’clock. The sky was blue yet tinged with pink over the white spires which broke up the east horizon. The smell of the afternoon’s brief shower was still evident and small pools of clear water collected in the tilt of the gutters, leaves and tiny curling scraps of paper drifting in the miniature tides which nonetheless caught and reflected the swollen sun, giving the boulevard its jeweled expression.

for Elliot Helfer

             Do potatoes suffer?

                            Would it be new
                             with a blue pen?

                This lightweight
                            futuristic
                                slightly minimalist
                        black German
                                          fountain pen

                     The Lamy Safari

             The alphabet
                    with my name inserted
                                 black against red