The café walls are covered with pictures of flying parrots;
I take a table, rest my arms; the table gently tips,
A dozen strangers sit and sit and talk, all they do is lovely,

After midnight, lying in bed thinking of you,
I heard a squeal, and let the cigarette fall
From my fingers like a petal, as I watched the window open

Enough inside jokes,
let's move this bash out
under the stars. Heap up

I awake, three in the morning, sweating
from a dream of possums.
I put my head under the fuzzy swamp of cover.

I understand:
for years, perhaps, you have lived
underground. Handling only

At first, we spoke in many languages.
Mainly jabbed and pointed amidst
The din of pounding and sawing. But

At the back of a Point Reyes ravine
Mescaline, three powdery silver piles
Poured on knife blades and then and there licked clean.

Out of lapis blue the face
         rises
round and smiling like a bell.

Over, the kite’s flight; and of a sudden
is the realization of the morning overcome
by the echo of dark nights, silent witness
to the colorlessness crouching down before us.
Stealing time is what’s been happening all the time.
Is it because you’ve heard only your own cries,
fifty years earlier, too, as they went by, adulterated with death?
Or some shy, crumpled laughter carrying with it
the air of an unspoken but certain defeat?

I test the seasonal rains to see
if they construe how light matters.
Each evening as the clouds happen,