ADMINISTRATION OF COUNTERFEIT VIRTUE


She's got a plastic Hollywood ashtray stashed in her desk drawer

He's selecting a fig
leaf for the campus logo

a leitmotif

And the bird goes blind in its egg . . .

What leaves

(The Christian, on his ascending ladder, burns an outline over
__the water,
and then we know, once we’ve seen it,
that kind of silence--it’s hard to just write it away . . . )

Comes back as something covered with winter

A benevolent, anti-intellectual lust . . .

Mountains and sky painted by Albert Bierstadt

Fireworks for cave-dwellers

And then the wind starts blowing

A pelican sits watching CNN, wearing slippers, drinking a
__glass of scotch . . .

*

It's not really part of this season anyway

Beowulf growls at Jane Austen . . .

But the student's not delusional, she's talking to God long distance

not exactly the business plan dad had in mind . . .

Which is why we find ourselves out West

once again

looking to escape

(A segue from the merely fatuous?)

sleeping through the fog
of another marine layer . . .

The Crucifix casts such a tall tall shadow

*

And the black crowned night herons crap
all over the eucalyptus trees
they’re nesting in, the trees shifting in the soft Pacific light

the birds muttering to themselves

As I stand facing the green water, the sound of traffic grows
__faint . . .

World blindness

just one voice had been in the room

But then everyone started talking at once

I’m aware of all of this now

standing here

in Southern California

listening to the roar of the ocean . . .