Like I get this phone call from Shirley MacLaine,
it's the middle of the night, right,
she's all confused about time,

They cut off hands and composed cantatas;
They gutted their neighbors like fish and released
The shape of spirits from bonds of ebony;

Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dish
in 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drug
and by the fifties had become both widely available
and cheap, which is to say that penicillin arrived
in time for me, who without it would have died
a child on more than one occasion, but didn’t
and grew to see the things around me die instead.

The maples' glory is their own release,
A martyrdom tricked out to tempt a saint;

The sidewalks are wobbling in the god-awful heat.
        Ninety-eight in the shade,
Where there is shade, as New York lies locked under
        Layers of high pressure

And then his name was their name (Forethought,
Premonition, how the word had frightened them!),

Bottom line, it doesn't have one;
or if it does, it's for the souvenir value,
a knickknack marketed under ghastly light

A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon

so you sat down to mourn
what became a corpse of light

Eventually she stayed
with the overflown artery of Ouse
fingering pebbles one at a time two