My thick hands tripped and stumbled
over the deviant keys,
my sour stomach off-key,

When we lift up the cover:
a brisk wind of bees.

Could it be that Yeats was right?
This digital shorthand that will shake
the whole world up as the millennium ends

   I’ve just been writing a letter in which I announced that I had finished a novel with or without pain and distress, that the considerable manuscript was lying in my drawer ready to go, with the title already in position and packing-paper at hand, or the work to be wrapped and sent in. Furthermore, I have purchased a new hat which for the present I shall wear only on 

how many subway flights to tear away / this terror

I am thinking / of a broken-down blue door / in a flop house.

What we have         before us, obviously,
is the intestine.         So why, you may wonder,
did I call you         to the operating room

meaning a context or vision to confer with this which could be a 
book. 
meaning what I just said confers with this but a licking sound. 

—Like so many fine twigs 
snapped by the rainstorm
that’s sweeping this city today,

Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney, there was no weather.
At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry.
The first service would depart soon. The puddles lay dark in the stone streets