She didn't like him: long nose baits,
Voice patient yet overbearing (a voice
Meant for a world of women-as-children).
He'd expect a yielding kiss if not more.

The train swayed past cropped fields,
Barking collies, abandoned gas works, cows.
Brown bungalows with little gardens

The log-crammed trucks smash the yielding air,
Whine like leviathan gnats.
Last week a trucker died at the wheel

The smothering heat of a July night
Squats in a second floor bedroom
And doesn’t move despite the desk fan’s

Who’d known about soybean stew or what
A camshaft did or how asparagus grew?
Even the much-mowed grass was new to those

The little candles which dot the rosette-bedecked
Sheetcake sway so demurely that the happy
Huffing and puffing comes as a cosmic surprise,

It was a summer for sitting naked in
The backyard, the deep drizzle deploying the young
As an aspect of the lately-discovered elemental.

Cynical millenarian, I like
You in this shot, posed without
Insignia or emblems,

Any tourist will tell you:
Envisioning is our medicine.
I, too, hope to see what I can’t see.

Bemusement was the better part of sanity,
And sanity was your glance past the surly
Occasion to the sheer morning or moment

“Good trembling,” CJ said as we
Walked along the docksides in our thin jackets
Even though it was winter on the East Coast.

I do not call something “wisdom”
When I can predict the next verity.

You see it especially in the paintings of
The mid-nineteenth century—that serene, beckoning
distance