Some inhabitants of a city were milling around a room one sunny day looking at an exhibit of historical maps of earlier iterations of their city, all carrying fragile nostalgias in their minds, which they all thought of as the only possible nostalgia, but in fact they were inhabiting a city radiating with multiple and multilexical and multi-stratigraphic nostalgias. 

We were nostalgic for the time when the pointillist paintings had looked like autumnal birch trees, rather than for the time when the autumnal birch trees had looked like pointillist paintings. 

Four deer stood poised down in a valley as the train passed by, like four artworks in a museum, framed in the rectangular windows of the train, a tableau vivant that hardly changes no matter how many times the train passes, heading north or heading south, for the poised deer are the same poised deer that stood there a century ago, the streams ferrying their cargo of dead twigs are the same streams as two centuries ago, the trees felled and ­planted and ­tended and felled and planted and tended, and felled,

What happens in this world happens in gold,
the metal in our dreams that signals immortality
bright fame, undying fire, the hour dipped

Somehow, the two of us sit in a café
bordering the park. Its grass succumbs
again to chronic green, and I see,

there’s only one season under capitalism
spring

He assures me that my head “doesn’t look shaved”
when he sees evidence of my late teen unhappiness. 
There are this many heads I want to break with this 

I went to the liquor cabinet and filled my empty jar with a
bit of each, called it mayonnaise and began to sip, trying to
get caught for something other than this. My deeds are negligible
and death is strong. The rest comes easy.

I am writing from a place you have never been,
Where the trains don’t run, and planes
Don’t land, a place to the west,

This was our enemy with whom we
danced a half century