Follow the script and the scripture. / Even the biography of the damned / is told with sobbing compassion.

I’m a laid off mooch / of a prof using up fuel / to cut grass close / around apple trees / where voles eat roots / and breed and breed / deep in the grass, hidden / from fox and hawks.

My father does not believe / That the small things accrete, / That the infinitesimals / Lean together to form a whole.

because / I like her. I like / the signs of wear on her; / the way her breasts have dropped a little with the years; / the weathered evidence of joy around her eyes.

There she goes again, spinning / her wheelchair ’round the nursing home. / Two years, five thousand laps. So far.

Does it matter that a migrating tern / is standing in the Fox River / with a goldfish in its beak? / The tern is a Caspian with a lovely black head / like the back-combed Italian mobsters in old movies.

I hear the slightly scratched voice of Joan Baez coming from / the record player singing about the junipers in the pale moonlight, / applause erupting like hailstones on a corrugated iron roof.

They say in Avignon people dance on the bridge / that was either unfinished or fell apart— / no one remembers those folk stories anymore.

Another Monday in another February and the streets outside / are shiny with sleet, speckled with litter. Everything / diminishes—sumac and elm, Dad’s old Buick. Lust.

Before he was a seagull / he was the bed of the ocean / its stronghold and place of / penance, a tenderfoot of sorts.