1.
Of course it is a
kind of nature: the waiters
and the waitresses,
always under twenty-five,
lattes blooming in their hands.
2.
Why should poets praise
the rhetoric of seasons?
Why not instead that
fleeting and more creamy truth
bequeathed us by Capuchins?
3.
Reality in
fives and sevens: everything
must fit the measure:
parrots on a springtime limb
or sparrows on the tables.
4.
Morality may
sidle in. Don’t think too long
about the wages
sweated in the beans. Or muse
on bull calves trucked from dairies.
5.
Alone in all this
wild percussion, whistled steam
and clattered chatter,
the poet finds a stillness
here, down inside the poem.