Sympathy, to begin with, is a problem.
The hotels are okay and there's free soap
to smuggle home. Lunches are not lavish

Like I get this phone call from Shirley MacLaine,
it's the middle of the night, right,
she's all confused about time,

To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
this is offered, for I need help
deciphering my dream.

Gothic flowers bedded themselves
in the edges of this night, the night
when a bullet pierced her rib precisely,

Flecked on a layer of mortar on the pillbox lid,
the tiles pieced together by some kindred myopic
have caught this much of Tuscany: hills worn down

Blackout-in the theater as well as on screen. From a distance
we hear Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians." It almost
sounds like a train approaching. Now we hear voices: by turns

Not smart to be out under trees with the wind still this
high: billowing & breaking bring down stob ends
of last year's drought-wood that died way up in the branches,

It's true. I lied. Isn't that how
we stay alive? Dr. Metz in Old Testament
101 said Moses parted the reeds on a lake,

Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann by the light
Gold after-light of a California sunset,
Strolled with their wives on a deserted beach

For noble persons, madness seems to have been
A matter of custom--in the old romances.
Alas! I shall be mad, they say, and at once