the music of the body. As such, I still wake
molecular, determined to encounter each
wondrous unfoldment of doing in the parade
from here to there, endangering greed or suffused
by the unwieldy structure of dream that yields to
no autonomy save the interdependent
whole. Every dream has its own nightmare and yet
these children will not be wolves. We are wood people
where the kings speak in oblivion. This silly
hat was given to me by a great woman. Cold
and blood-warm we steel ourselves against the headlines
starting not with the universe, but the duty
to enumerate the universe’s utter
complexity, crashing the windows in rank waves
of seeing, taking the streets with both our ears warped
by fleeing machinery, our nostrils duly
plumbed by each passing hormonal swoop. I finger
a car’s insect-speckled fender and know a stray
will soon be stalking here its incidental break-
fast or merely by the jogger’s sweat-stained brand name
Lycra I better know the neighborhood’s shift toward
an ever-blanchening whiteness. Waking inside
the molecular of my own making, already
not where I was, and moving further in the gaze
gone fetid between the trees.
