My best idea so far had been
to take a girl to a half-built house
and feel up her breasts, but bras back then

This tree keeps falling over. I prop it up,
it falls again. And the rain falls
day after day like a broken wet record.

Split a rental house in Hackensack
with two friends—fellow painters (Judy
and Stu? Suze and Elwood?) who

I perched curious as a little bird on the windowsill
between the Age of Enlightenment
and the age of thirty. Disappointment scuttled

To feel you knock
your radishy
fist against the wall

Contaminated air, poisoned ground,
Infected bodies in the cemetery, and the dead
Scattered in the fields in grievous wars,

Your malleable brightness is alluring:
if you’re shiny he’s blinded by the pants of you.

OK, it’s sunny, otherworldly, skintight,
where we’re flabby and clouded over, pining away

More lovely the cowboys falling from false fronts
onto a cardboard-mattress medium

The wind might not lament; the gift-shop door
could jingle bells, the jasmine candles wafting.