[1] Standing in front of the torso of a dead American

elm, on a rainy New York afternoon, he dreams of the golden pools

of serrated leaves eddying and hovering between their bodies as they now move

between those almost touching skyscrapers - touching almost in the reflections in windows - divided by a trafficked avenue.

[2] She has departed already even as she turns sleepily in his embrace.

Fog drifts back from the bay, obliterating the islands, their distant bluffs, delicate hanging bridges, and drifters begging at street corners. And the swift night they spend

in a hotel room whose number they will not be able to recall, and which seems to prefer its mass produced solitude to their blind groping

darkens over the armies of their dreams moving towards a time of reckoning, i.e., a massacre.

[3] Since I can't live here otherwise I insulate myself with paper. And sleep in a coffin of poems.

Your shade doesn't reach me. The curve of your belly is a horizon. So I sleep alone in a tenement night.

[4] In the end what do we leave behind? If we are so fortunate, moderately happy children who will remember our follies to their children for a few more years.

[5]