Observe: this season and its discarding. We may meet in the cusp of spring under a naked willow tree, laughing.

Now I am here, you are there, and these hours how they swim through air like leaves falling. A proverb: observe everything and its obverse.

[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]

[1] Walking towards a dinner in the fortress of solitude, he realizes that unlike the trees preparing to disrobe for a winter's kiss and then a summer's worth of dappled dreams, he hadn't felt life move in his husk for years.

[2] A dancer to a Police song - "Everything is magic" - finds him hiding his tears bending over the lamb on his plate, and in all innocence of the very young, moves closer to where he sits, and twirls and twirls. Everything is magic in the mirror of her large round eyes, clear of suffering that now veins his spying ones.