There is a kind
of whiteness to the day,
everything pared down,

An implied corkscrew of peel garners the apple.
For days, wholly curved, the fruit has rested here.
The high lights of various mornings have settled

The leopard attacks the trainer it
Loves, over and over, on every
Page, loves and devours the only one it allows to feed

You wait forever till you can’t wait any longer—
And then you’re born.
Somebody is pointing something out

He has none, of course.
Appearing to carry one
in the specious recesses

The thing to avoid is in that frame,
the reasoned screen fixing light
and shade in pithy squares of shape.

Last night with our minds still in cold April
in the late evening we watched the river
heavy with the hard rains of the recent spring

It is said that after he was seventy
Ingres returned to the self-portrait
he had painted at twenty-four and he

A sentence continues after thirty years
it wakes in the silence of the same room
the words that come to it after the long comma

The delectable names of harsh places:
Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.
In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,