The muse at daybreak stuttering, informs my bed,
pines in the scented winter air for poems,
and mumbles about the government and whether I should vote:

When I was little and lived on Queens Boulevard my
mother told me stories   the coffee is boiling
The soldier at left throws his grenade into the air

The gulls glide, in 1939, into the bonus of another country, 
the balloons and machinery of all the Europes and Americas, 
a hundred million words at ease in the river, 

Some days you run out and love
every man that you can.
The wind is heard hollering

You’ve left a hole
the size of the sky
in the chair across the table

An envelope under the door.
Feel the strand that bridges it
to the hand of the mailman,

Silver crashed and the lights went out in Ashcroft.
A century passes in a dream.
Some houses stand,

for Nicole Doise

The way to this is. Not easy to find when you know
how it ends, the clutter of was. Hard enough
finding one's own face in the brass

A trick of October light
made festive the trek we
took to the empty beach,

A fallow field in January, crisping
under our boots; the red barn, slanting roof

that slumps and decays; the seed-stitching