finally the hour has come
it is time for the long journey
I say to my wife and child a last farewell

and click the blue button
my face appears across from my face
it is the day we will virtually discuss

the unpredictable resolutions I am sure
obscurely will decide my fate
the ostensible chair begins to speak

thank you for your electrons
I hope you are well in these days   
or at least surviving

Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dish
in 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drug
and by the fifties had become both widely available
and cheap, which is to say that penicillin arrived
in time for me, who without it would have died
a child on more than one occasion, but didn’t
and grew to see the things around me die instead.

Here I am       I’ve been watching the animals
              I watch them in the afternoon
that seems to drop my being       lower into time

bullfrogs singing from the long grasses
              horses captured in a video
              Wild is a horse’s word       They are running

Sunset in the valley,
which is still sometime away

from “official sunset,”
this inland of an earlier

nautical twilight;
but at the fastigium

of the dead central limb
of a York gum

at the southwest corner
of the red shed,

A man in a mask and wearing a fat tank on his back is bent to the door of the
          parking garage.
He is spraying and wiping, wiping and spraying. Another man with no mask
          and no hair shuffle-dances around him,
gives a wave, crosses the street, tries to open the door to the hotel, which is
          locked and closed, darkened for good:

to say yes. I believed as a child.
Meaning I feared. Or I loved.
Or stood in the sun braced for those
stupid photos—Easter, Christmas, Fourth of July.

Redact, redact, erase, cross out, tear it up,
let the wind take it. And wind
showers down embers.

That’s sleep, isn’t it? So many

      As the storm moved in, you marked the night
And later the night marked you. A biblical clap woke
      The house to a spray of sheetrock: a powdered sprite
Sprung off the nailheads. Air flavored with ozone.
                                On the ceiling in the hallway, a halo
                                   Grew orange around a fixture, aglow—
                                And Dad on the phone

      Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,
Only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hiss
      The hiss of the grasses hissing What should
What should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,
                                My mind, you hardly
                                   Seem to be.
                                On days like these.

I have not forgotten, neighbor,
our red brick rowhouse, tiny and quiet
with the window always cracked open
even in winter

I still recall the little whitewashed lodging where
we lived in peace, just off a major thoroughfare.