Today’s subject is an architecture of cards,
laminate, cool, telling no fortunes. It’s
the world reduced to a series of integers

Archaeologist of the aesthetic, perception’s rhapsode;
perpetual bachelor, father by default leaving heirs
but no offspring; elliptical ascetic sideswept by eros,

Across the divider lines and cracked asphalts of America,
the cottonwood, poppy, paintbrush bloom, iris
and interstate litter live without a past or future,

We had been waiting on the porch at evening
in thought. Uneventful winds dropped down
from the green park of rock west of town—

came as a surprise, even beyond astonishment,
turned into a monument carved in rock
like Ozymandias, a hard fact. The self’s

If, in depicting the angels, I cannot
avoid something, as well, of what
the river that day cast before me,
the musculature of the rowers’ arms,

You lived here once. City—remember?—
of formerly your own, of the forever beloved,
of the dead,

Naturally, the preference is for
victory, not persistence
which, like fire if not put out,

                If done steadily, and with the kind of patience that belies all fear, 
it is indeed possible to walk the plank backward from the doom 
of vanishing

The barn is warm, come inside, lie down,
sleep. Here, no sheep ever fails