Claude, be still, light
is what you're seeing now:
the moon contained in dusk,

With a shriek gulls fled across a black sky,
all of us under the pier were silent,
my blood ached from waiting, then we resumed.

While others were discussing
the styles of metopes,
I lay down in the Temple of Zeus

Naked but for dainty shoes, garter
and a ribbon in her long red hair,
she takes him in the way history takes us in:

Saturday. Early afternoon. High
Spring light through new green,
                                         a language, it seems, I have forgotten,

This was the year drought autumn never ended.
Rivers couldn’t float their barges, prairies
burned in a sulphurous caul, dead blossoms and clots

                          The workman
in white crossing the street
carries the wood T-beam

Nel mezzo del cammin what one finds is beans
and wrinkled cabbage and an awful case
of ambling vacuity, an affliction resembling

I hate the quiet, green suburban hills
of Scythia, and all the new-built houses,
all alike, around which children play

I am what I deserve, blinkered, public,
Get-atable, indecorate, with finch-like tints,
Neither black nor white but always gray,