FLOUTING DETERMINISM

We eat afternoon
To bones in
A metropolis where ghosts

Are always hungry, their vivisected
Steam-plume quotations
Coddled by racket or carved

Into disappearing paper
Snowflakes against the charcoal
Doors, all these

Memories passing
The way veins
Collapse, little bruises

Surfacing like twice
Exposed film, I do not wish
To wash the fingerprints

From my thought nor burnish
An age made rough
By understanding, I imagine the cat

Dreams of a fluttering
Hand in a lush
Leafy darkness, when I was

Twelve there was nothing
More pleasant than the startling
Ping of crab

Apples hitting hoods and here
I am disheartened
By the flat, arid music

Of Western Imperialism, its accord
Looming, the epiphanies
Gutted, but all parts are not

Pieces, the eyes close most
Often to open
Upon the diminishing

Grandeur of amputated scenes
Those that ebb only
To bare the imperative

Quality contained therein, one has
But to walk the deserted
Halls of a museum to know

How much life these portraits
Need gathered about, how much trouble
Resides in the definite

Mind when our best defense
Against terrorist attacks is to be late
To work, my love

Loves me enormous and the coincidence
Of these emotions dispels
Dogma in the same way it spells

Out a burdensome absurdity, my sister
Fears the introduction
To her book will cast a wraithlike

Pall over the remainder but
I appraise her
Of certain things:

1) all well-intentioned beginnings
2) wander in the hope
3) of flouting determinism

The wolfman weeps
Unconscious in the unfinished
Suburban development

As here in the botanical gardens
The turtles stick their necks
Out for sun and if the turtles stick

Their necks out why not we?