The house
A frightened face
In the window of another house.

The branches shake, Jimmy, it rains in that trance;
Tuxedo in the colonnades asks after your breakfast.
A fire rises and falls in the house of Cadmus

Another cow was floating by us,
hilariously calm, bell-deep 
in milkweed and tansy. She looked 

He gazed into the air, searching for a word in my language.
I blinked. Across the pool a zephyr stirred, in my language.

Where was I? Where was he? Where he looked, remembering?

Each of us waking to the window’s light
Has found the curtains changed, our pictures gone;
Our furniture has vanished in the night

In a bookshelf at the dark livingroom’s end
stood the ten volumes of Journeys Through Bookland
which my parents bought when I was born.

The night refills itself.
Limestone drops to the sea
that varies blue all day

“Beginning at five o’clock, just before dawn rises
in the rear-view mirror, I drive at eighty, alone,
all day through Texas. I am a pencil extending

I will strike down wooden houses; I will burn aluminum
clapboard skin; I will strike down garages
where crimson Toyotas sleep side by side; I will explode

The avenue rises toward a city of white marble.
I am not meeting anyone. The capitol is empty.
I enter the dome of sleep.