The whole idea of it makes me feel 
like I’m coming down with something, 
something worse than any stomach ache 

Here is a piece of required reading 
at the end of our century 
the end of a millenium that began with the crusades

The imagination, improvising, translated burly leather 
into an overcoat of armor, converted brawn to iron. 
For wrinkled folds, die-tooled metal plates 

These junipers growing out from the yellow rocks
   now in the sunlight near the top of the steep slope
under its split cliff face and these dwarf oaks returning

The ice again in my sleep it was following someone
   it thought was me in the dark and I recognized its white 
                                                                                            tongue

Summer afternoon, Henry James said,
the most beautiful words in the language.
I wonder if he saw those summer afternoons

High noon in the park, as the year begins its
onward march to truly infernal weather.
“Is it hot enough for you?” yell the normal,

The moon isn’t looking for solutions.
She’s grown accustomed
to partialities,

Darkness washes over you . . .
      Only the sofas are safe under the lamps’ umbrellas . . .
I feel the earth so fully, beaten beneath the floor, the asphalt,

It’s slippery, the little by little you’re left with.
thread of a peacock in profile
glimpsed on a chimney,