Becoming eighty
Might be nothing much
If I could be well,

Dark gathers
In this wood
Without weather

Avenging ivy padding up the wall of the Abbey’s west wing
Could only be part of a masterplan to rescue posterity
From a curling, yellowing, nonetheless dangerous manuscript

We prefer to call it Le Système D,
the labyrinth of our permanent exile,
the magic houses and identity cards:

the ladder keeps going. The black dust

that peels the paint off your car

There is a chortle which is the chord of three ideas struck at once: a man carrying a hatrack; a wishbone in the center of an enormous plate; an idiot watching a snowfall. 

I strode sideways through adoring crowds, till the day my perfect profile crashed through a storefront.

Nothing could be predicted. Behind the closed lid, the outstretched hand, what streamers, shocks, accordions of foam!

   I tried using my high position to make everyone wear little hats. 

                                         In Montmartre, far from the sea he loved, crippled 
                                         by arthritis, Corbière nailed up over his chimney 
                                         the dried carcass of a toad.