And even fish, pulled from lakes and ponds
and swimming, now, in glassed-in tanks with bubble
baths, and growing fat on food for free—

Old Wordsworth’s world (who wrote a hundred hundred
sonnets, songs of rivers, lakes and trees)
was bowls of steaming porridge, moonlight, breezes

He knows the way
across, he sees
where every stroke will lead.

My head emerging from this paper box—
not heavy but sufficiently opaque
and put there up across my balding pate

Which heart shall it be tonight,
the fist, or the little lettuce?

The Seagull was a failure, the burlesque crowd began to shout
   “Intellectual rot!” And then, before dinner at the
   Hermitage

One day he steps out for a pack of smokes
And comes back to find his family has deserted him.
The wife with the end curled hair, the boy and the girl

He begins to notice how all his single friends have dogs
And wear expensive running shoes, how their conversations run
To deep metaphysical questions that didn’t exist before 1983.

All are ghost faces, and all of us sick
walking in our own sick skin. I am myself
here to avoid you, hovering always

On holiest day dismal I am digested myself, composed.
There will be one of these each year, specific apology,
each sin. That of horrible tongue, cut-rusted, that