--- R O N A L D   D O N N

You know how I feel about caddy corners.
The room running far out of things to mean,
especially on Saturday.  No rest,
no stoplights, no appreciable amount of labor
will move the couch into place.
You best of all understand how we talk here
to discuss there.  You understand what
it is to be issued a warning: I assure you.

If we were walking and you lifted an ear
to the calm, calm sea, imperative and imperial.
The natural dissent of standing seaside.
Choppy waves.  Sea shells happening differently,
zoology happening differently.   Too bad
dead is happening differently, you might say,
you would definitely say.  With an ear down
to the mouth of a ruby, perhaps, patiently
waiting in the zone of allegory,

keeping an eye open for the symbol and where
it parked its car, things you and I
may have had happen.  Let us, in that case,
go.  The summary is waking up
as though weeping could put me in the mood,
imperative and awful, because I wish to speak
with the ease of our usual anonymous love
songs.  I wish the longitude of our talk
were the same as the latitude, to put it
allegorically.  If, of course, only

it were up to me to advise the butterfly:
eat no pork.  Color in the lines.  You know
how it feels, naturally, to give tiny advise:
there's no star for the Landing of Normandy,
but a formula: Butterfly Eat No Pork.
Armed to the teeth with such a theory,
my love, my dear Penelope, My Dear Maria,
we may win out over the presumptuous torture

of dripping water faucets, or obsessing
about the cubist death song in the ice box,
or your referential mania which turns everything
into a love song, or getting acquainted
with a coloring book of stained glass
in the four square skeleton of Paradise.