Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping

He was like you,
always cramming and ramming, spluttering in disgust

Like sandbox toys abandoned in mid-play
when mothers finally call the children home,
cars, trucks, and tanks lie strewn along the highway,

In old movies they searched the mummy’s tomb
with flashlights, on tiptoe—as if the dead
were listening, numbered the catacombs

If I could do exactly what I wanted
I would move a harpsichord into my back yard
and ask Elaine Comparone to play for me all morning.

And still there is no season's story told
by words, expressive, eager to explain;
no winter's tale will pass from mouth to mind;

Lillian Russell, I think of her standing
at the rail of the Niew Amsterdam as it sails
through Caracas to get a taste of the real slums

I am trying a dozen fruits and flowers
to get one sound

Inside the picture it is 1903—late spring or early summer.
The three women sit on the front porch steps,
a potted fern to their right on the middle stair,

Here I am walking between Ocean and Neptune
sinking my feet in mile after mile of wet life.