A single pant leg dangles from the chair. 
Mud from the hem leaves graves on the floor.
Crescent moon: the last button 

Half Border Collie, Half Black Strip.

Ruined. That's it. That makes the whole damn roll.

 
It's a sunset. In warm, declining light,

It’s an awesome thing, when fate takes you at your word 
at eighteen or twenty. If Dreams weren’t greater than Action. . . 
Happiness on this earth! One has to be pretty vulgar 

Did you love her? I thought about her
continuously for a year. There were whole hours
there was nothing too thin about her look, her voice.

What composes a life? Mine comes, too much, from books;
but also the sense that, if you climbed high places,

you would see the streets go on with nothing to end them,

      Gin-weary, temple on the pane,
      I watch the props begin to shake
      The sunlight . As we climb, the plane

1    It’s been raining six days now,
      stinks of worms. Every grocery-store
      weather mat in the whole city has been

This is what’s known
as SERIOUS BUSINESS.
That’s why the title line

How hard it was to fit the last crayon into the bulging box; like the last person who pushes onto the elevator and is resented by the insiders.

Aside from the downstate confluence of Tri-Borough, George Washington and Throgs Necks Bridges, I have placed a kleenex box at a few of the second-string stress points which parallel the New York State Thruway,—at Syracuse which is on my kitchen table and at Albany which is next to the toaster.