I dreamed I didn’t have to put things off,
was already some Gracie out of cartoon orbit
around some George, had her plummy
voice with a wire running through it, was
supernumerary, another woman already
there and wanting us out.

The new ones never know the man
has all his women with him all the time,
a bit lower than higher, someplace only
desperate birds would nest.  Move over.

Those dreamers who thought god’s own
world was a vast slick plain of nothing, humans
just defacements of celestial vacations.
Such gods as are left us like their worlds
mirror-smooth, devoid of impediment.

I pass down this way undone by places
where he took his heart and stayed,
everything always unfinished now,
every day always already yesterday.

The cat watches for what she only hears,
waits for nothing to fill up with a mouse
(that mouse, in fact, has been eating her
food for a week). If we couldn’t conceive of
a circle, everything would bang right out.

How the heart trudges us around like
ponies people put kids on at fairs,
paying to ride an imaginary pony, not
the real one, not the sorry rag some
dipshit bully can make of your life,
always facing the butt in front of you,
someone else always facing yours.
Round and round.

Far out where you cast your mind, that blue
at the edge of your head you know inside:
a ship in a waterspout.

The sound of water waving in a metal pan,
the dipper in the day’s allotment,
how scarcity begs us to ration
the things we cannot live without.