That love of hospitality 
                                                 & the old Irish 
passion for food and drink            (good food, 

The big claw takes its angle
and drives down hard,
shivering Kezar’s concrete bleachers

Smoking a cigarette in a classroom
a woman is copying sentences from
a book called Our American Way of Life

A large unpleasant woman
Is chasing a songbird around the kitchen
With a broom shouting

Junked hypodermics made it hard to walk
along the Tiber by the deserted, grand
sandstone embankment of the temple block.

It’s a story as famous as the three little pigs:
one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,
closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,

We’re watching the sad movie
for the seventh time today.
Let’s take off our tear-vial

Snowfall, thicker and thicker,
dovecolored, like yesterday,
snowfall, as if you had been asleep just now.

But beautiful is the dog lost,
once headed east, then later

in the dark south. But
beautiful is the cold

Well, he can sell the whole dog, the long, the short
with all its parts, nothing missing, sliced and chunked.
The bole, the bulk, the stem, the stalk, the hulk.