Foreskin. A default setting.

Scraped the last $8.48
from the glass jar.
Your day’s worth of tips

at the nail salon. Enough
for one hit. Enough
to be good

till noon but
these hands already
blurring. The money a weird

Poetry’s “impulse, like electricity, crossing the space, leaves its signature.”
            —W. S. Graham

No wonder that a flash of sparks
Spills out from what I touch—the LaserJet,

Brimming with static shock,
Suspends invisible electron-clouds

Across the laser-paper’s Radiant White
To print “The Windhover”

Electrostatically—
Hopkins’ creation-poem, spelled out

for Elliot Helfer

             Do potatoes suffer?

                            Would it be new
                             with a blue pen?

                This lightweight
                            futuristic
                                slightly minimalist
                        black German
                                          fountain pen

                     The Lamy Safari

             The alphabet
                    with my name inserted
                                 black against red

There is not one leaf left on that tree
on which a bird sits this Christmas morning,

the sky heavy with snow that never arrives,
the sun itself barely rising. In the overcast

A storm of buzzards is circling outside the window
of my hospital room, looking south and east across the river
toward the high-rise construction cranes downtown.
They are a regular sight in December, buzzards migrating
in particulate vortices, slow-moving gyres that resemble,
from a distance, glassless, black-feathered snow globes.
Satin-hemmed sheaths of cloud shuttle across the sky,
diffuse silver light alternating with bursts of Florida sun,
the occasional spatter of raindrops from a string
of unseasonable storms parading up from the Gulf,
cars composing a stop-and-go stream of metal
parallel to the river, small Caribbean freighters docked
along quaysides of cabbage palms and crab traps,
I can see it all with great clarity, the birds, the traffic,
it’s effortless—the doctor in the eye clinic
spoke enviously of my vision, better than 20/20,
even at my rapidly advancing middle age.

1.
There’s a sign near the waterfront
I think it’s advertising cheer:
says 400 years, virginia spirits. A swig.

A year ago last night, my dead crowd me
an even ceremony
of Jamestown, at the schooner

that brought those first here.
They think: long trip
did not yet know, not the longest part

Standing on the platform, Manchester Victoria,
waiting for the after-supper train. Home,
to Glasgow.

        Luke 19:11

Wheat threshed, casks of cherries, plums,
boiled melon, beef tallow, pig bladders blown
and tossed by children, mothers stirring stock,
kidneys, hearts pressed with aspic,

casings scraped and stuffed, allspice, cloves.
Fields bare, packed clay, porcelain sheen,
the long winter sleep. In my dream,
I wake and the village is empty,