Winter is thick as rock
In the quarry of icy season
And snow squeals underfoot:

Because the houses
are low and driveways
stubby, the sidewalks

I rubbed my eyes. The lightning 
Caught a curving line 
Of tents and lost them. Under 

Here, where the people chiefly are resigned 
To doubting all the words their leaders use 
(Mass-graves that hold forgotten hopes), they find

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

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

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,

 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

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