5

When the light sprang from the sea, blowing,
the window sintered and blew like Venus
revealing my tenderness
and many minds
the way a night shot
discovers a beast drinking
and my responsibilities
eating me
as dogs eat gizzard.

I saw the city
changed
set up like laboratory glassware,
amines of herring brine,
the malic acid of the sea buckthorn,
glass-enclosed prescription balance,
steel and agate, Fabrik Koln
a physics clear as alcohol,
La Vita Nuova, I hardly knew.

Creditors dined at the Cliquot Club,
they read the papers, trade changed.
Their horses died, the big-bellied;
their dogs slept in the steam heat.

An ambulance with modest
glass doors and a silver cross
keeps night watch:
A surgeon.
Delicate nickel-plated
instruments are laid on trays.

Illuminated on the operating table
naked glassblowers,
gunsmiths, barbers, clerks, importers,
old men from hotels, pink and tailored,
naphtha-smelling Irish priests,
cravat-and-boy face of the movie usher,
Frankel, Shmulik, Old Country watchmakers

then a white horse in the park,
cigars and politics.
The city wrapped in cellophane,
an act-born eggshape
twisted like Ugolino

one sea-water,
one circulatory system
of man observing his magnificent urea.