—Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev,

                     Dostoyevsky, Stendahl, and
                                                     others

A cold rainy March morning came.
Two birds woke up and saw the sun
that comes up every morning
regular as a piss hard on,
and wrestled over a worm that had been
lying frozen on the ground.

A man thrilled to the grating engine noise
of his favorite gas-power toy airplane,
watching it swoop and duck and strain
at its cord. It stopped
when he pressed off his alarm clock.

A city starts rumbling to life again
apropos of nothing but that it does this
6 days a week through no fault of its own
means nothing to me or it.