A summer
Song sans sense, in electric red,
On air guitar. 

And the blue afternoon
For pocket change, a terse notebook
Jotted down in a shirt pocket
To keep poems. 

But whatever it is, even the typography
Of space travel,
And if you can, do not
Hold it at arm’s length.

You took to the railroad lines like a fiddler to a roof.
And the hours out walking, an aficionado of being
For the wind and for the horizon and for the fields.
You took home the sweat of summer,
And into the night, the dimpled ribbon of the moon
Unravels along an airy topography. You are enlivened
By the malady of wing and antenna as the butterfly
Tops the ironweed. Like the evening dusk piled on the blue sky,
And above that, the night without any currency
Of its own giving away everything.

We should begin with
The moon, have your cat draw
The circle and its glow and its marred
Demeanor. Why don’t we stop
For some tea and enrich ourselves
On the rain-smell of the coming storm?
When the cat has finished,
And the moon is just right, and over the rooftops,
We will draw up evacuation plans
But they will all be forgeries
Splendidly like puddles or these
Journal entries. Truth be told,
The cosmos is a drum roll not unlike the smell
Of lilac,
The cosmos is also a strummed guitar the color
Of a lonesome whistle.
We should finish our evening by returning to
The moon, where we left it, have your car draw
It being swallowed by our sun
Now a red giant.

Even if, and this is
Stretching it, besides,
Where are wild
Flowers, some as tall
As parking meters?

Sunlight, lost
In the blinds, even so,
Just as well,
The moon is famished,
Fathom-weary,
Just look, the moon says,
I am dust and stone.

You don’t say? As for me,
A quantum and wry sandwich,
A myopia prescribed in glasses.
Zany with the zeal
Of an amateur poet.