Four deer stood poised down in a valley as the train passed by, like four artworks in a museum, framed in the rectangular windows of the train, a tableau vivant that hardly changes no matter how many times the train passes, heading north or heading south, for the poised deer are the same poised deer that stood there a century ago, the streams ferrying their cargo of dead twigs are the same streams as two centuries ago, the trees felled and ­planted and ­tended and felled and planted and tended, and felled,

What happens in this world happens in gold,
the metal in our dreams that signals immortality
bright fame, undying fire, the hour dipped

Somehow, the two of us sit in a café
bordering the park. Its grass succumbs
again to chronic green, and I see,

there’s only one season under capitalism
spring

He assures me that my head “doesn’t look shaved”
when he sees evidence of my late teen unhappiness. 
There are this many heads I want to break with this 

I went to the liquor cabinet and filled my empty jar with a
bit of each, called it mayonnaise and began to sip, trying to
get caught for something other than this. My deeds are negligible
and death is strong. The rest comes easy.

I am writing from a place you have never been,
Where the trains don’t run, and planes
Don’t land, a place to the west,

This was our enemy with whom we
danced a half century

I told you the words to it oriole.
Now when an ear come
say it right.

Consider 
        the ink-charged brush
on Wang Wei’s scroll, how the stroke that will mean tree