In a factory where they make chloramphenicol
          cats          loiter

one—gnarled
          like a woodblock: waterlogged, barnacled
another—thin with an elongated tongue—
          a fireman’s hook
and the third—huge like a calm
          in the Persian Gulf

Maybe you do draw
                seriously,
but not now, alas! Lines
form a grill,
and behind it—lions.

Lions. Their life is a diplomat’s,
they pose on their paws, their heads double.
With celerity of computer chess,
lions occupy cells with each cell.

A jackal and a crow. Blood neither shed nor shared
between them. The dynamite, nearby, is armed.
They are barely contours, prepared
to escape the kernel of blackness and assume a rudimentary form.

Above them, thought balloons are floating. The cartoon repaginates
the seashore, windy, dry as bone.
When the rain falls, it becomes clear the photographer, buried to his waist,
was welded of bronze and focused on no one.

A Jugendstil tower. Myself quite new.
I heard the underbell flowers uncurl.

You were sitting on the little staircase. By all accounts, a pearl.
I stiffened. Limits were measured.

You were the sum of all you encountered,
become what you could not deter.

We were joined by the ladies’ confessor (and connoisseur),
self-absorbed as a Klein jug.