Without fear or fault, the green
Expanse of it drops off at acute
Angles, sudden and inconveniently,

From where she sat she could see
a sundial, but she couldn't read it.
Time was a brush fire burning somewheres,

Such pleasure one needs to make for oneself—.
She has snipped the paltry forsythia
to force the bloom, has cut each stem on the

It would have made no difference who
commanded us in those first hours . . .
                                —veteran, invasion of Normandy, 1944

"Nothing he had done before
   or would try for later"
         will explain or atone

(1.1)            The world's the total sum of all the facts,
                        which means a poor account of human
                           acts:

Grouped in the dusk at the station, blameless
and undaunted behind the burn of one shared cigarette,
this circle of children, their wronged can of animate garbage,

I could go out like that,
sucked to a whisper like the midtown
tax building explosively leveled

1.

How do they get so close to the window,
a tree in figment, arithmetic moon?
Summer broke you, winter builds you—

The thump of the newspaper on the porch
on Christmas Day, in the dark before dawn
yet after Santa Claus has left his gifts: