I have caught the cold of my country, cold looks in boxes, street corner to office
window, car window to bus stop, and if anger is so curative, I wish you could
look at it, cure it, your eye—

6 a.m., hail on tin, a bleary hour, ringing bells where sails bob, then: There goes
one of those herons!—

I bring a floppy sketchbook to the sea, tented on the bench beside me, the field
where I last saw black foxes—

the bookstore owner closes shop an hour early. I see your beloved at the market, but
I hardly see your face. It’s election day. She says, See you on the other side—

college friends text jokes about what we used to watch on television. The show
isn’t important. It’s the dread behind it—

on Main Street a mammoth exhaust, deep hungry rumbling swallows my Civic.
My Civic. I’ve made that much public, cruised a little bit of practicality around
town—

nodding to the guy walking by. To him, I’m the guy—

a message from a friend: “Here are the first few paragraphs. Hope you’re
staying sane. Please let me know what you think”—

I’d wanted to write like Laney wrote “Laney was here” in blue spray paint
on the barn’s styrofoam insulation—

why do I keep this? “There’s a chair-shaped stone in the woods of Pomfret”—

the contour is essential. The deer path follows it—

I look at my hand. Red. Bleeding? No, that’s tomato—

“everything up for grabs.” Someone running has their fortune, while the other
relies on “donors like me”—

inside with my coat on. Not saving money. “Gaining perspective”—

toward the year 2100—

a goof to care so much, I think, walking through the dark outside the labs,
trippy screen flares caught through windows of the empty offices—

I’m a little turned around—

all day, couldn’t think. Tried timing a walk with the weather. Still ended up soaked. Wrote nothing, but this—

It was like the first time I ever saw a painting. I entered the bar and saw a painting
of the bar on the wall to the right, and in the painting, I saw the door I’d just walked
through, I saw the street I’d left behind. I saw myself walking through the city in
still traffic. I entered the door painted on the wall there, and inside, saw a horse
pulled by brushstroke through the park. I must get back to it. The eyes were real, the
years were real, the nose—