Foolish desires!  of small victories, that slip away like
trails of small animals in snow.  I see my face on postage
stamps, on flags grown limp in still air.  I sink my claws
into stationary sent from the Chamber of Commerce.  A star
by my name plaque, every zoo in the state. . . .
 
Hartford, Connecticut, April 1975—the legislature runs
through strange pastures for the afternoon.  Then what? In
the woods near Middletown, down the scruff grass that
lines I-91, on the black rocks of New Haven, I fall like a
clam shell from the gull's beak, a tortoise shell, empty,
drifting down into a cold dark.

Wisconsin fall:  windows closed these three weeks,
midnight chill you can still smell through the glass.
I reach for your book naturally after midnight,
 
work done, listening to the furnace click and halt
in my walls, and I study your photo once more.
Gazing down on that blueblack ocean
 
you must have joined in 1955.  Thinking
“even the sound of the rain repeats: The lease
is up, the time is near."

I wouldn't like to see balloons 
released to the sky—their helium blaze 
surmounting the trees, tentative 
in gusts but relentlessly rising. 
It would be shock to see
how straight up is curved, 
how even the air is humped high 
like the earth in its hills,
like the very arch of space. 
Such balloons never fall to earth whole, 
for by the time they rise halfway 
to the limit, they burst
from unimpeded success, 
and begin falling in tatters, 
nearly unrecognizable.  Or so 
they say who have seen it. 
I wouldn't like to see it, 
or say that I had seen it.