We have mastered the mysterious art
of harming those we claim to love the most

How does one know an El Greco?
I can’t say, but I just know

Here I am       I’ve been watching the animals
              I watch them in the afternoon
that seems to drop my being       lower into time

bullfrogs singing from the long grasses
              horses captured in a video
              Wild is a horse’s word       They are running

Tired already or just confused?

The ghost of him presiding
over those last, lost afternoons

At the Hotel Oblivion, Airport Drive
  Mezzanine, Conference Center B

The big claw takes its angle
and drives down hard,
shivering Kezar’s concrete bleachers

        —Are you an Ex-is-ten-tial-ist,
Mr. Mister?

I am, Madam., no beggar, but a peddler of dreams,
Purveyor of the Gospel of Beauty, Reciter of Rhymes . . .

And they regarded him from the shadows of their porches,

Far into fever, attached by cords to the soft-
clicking machines, he sleeps
in a bed in a room not his own.
People enter and pass like ghost-blown
fogs. He is a slow walk
with limbs that recently gave way.
He is part of the blue snowfall.