I was warm on the quadrangle
Warm on the grass by the library steps
Eating my sandwich

Chlorine and languor and vaporous
Threads rising like the steam off soup,
This brackish whirlpool wrinkles us,

My brain had been swiped clean.
I couldn’t love
songs I loved; friends came

Our eyes nearly shut, we hadn’t planned
       To talk of death, when the word
            Itself, like a jolt

By year’s end, some couples used book lights,
or even night-lights, so as not to make love
in total dark. What some told, others took in

I am not happy, but I’m well: enough
to suppose an unmedicated mind
a clean one. Not washed—like those elective

Not just because a child draws him — pie-faced and frontal, 
Grinning—it’s hard to watch the man’s head and hands take shape 
From a black magic marker, despite the other colors in the box: 

Never receives visitors, only inhabitants.
Outside, icicles thaw from the eaves in winter,
And even with its windows painted shut,

Now the universe wants to be known for
Itself, isn’t that why we’re here
Popped out on this terrace the color of stars

Fat trains moved for a hundred years, the river’s been
Altered by Republic Steel. Perhaps things only happen
When they stop