I'll read one more, "The Drunk Hedge Clipper."
The hedge clipper, drunk, took up his sharpened shears,
went out one night, a stoned Pygmalion.
He staggered past dark banks, the ship shape
smears, and snipped his scissors at a screaming woman.
He bowed, and threw his coat down
on the water of a streetlight for her.
In the alleys, pawnbrokers dance,
the color of old tartar beneath the moths.
He walked more precisely.
He sauntered into Western Union, helped himself
to yellow messages.
Ticker tapes grew arms and loved him,
convertibles went scalped for days thereafter.
He pinned a gay collapse of corkscrew curls
on a surf boarding buoy, between thrills and spills,
while the silhouettes of buildings browbeat him.
And he wondered how those cubes and angles,
those omniscient orbits, how can a lonely hedge hopper
clip, and make something to shout his lonely elusiveness,
show his hands are steady, though his skull may ache.
Now apples fall, and innocent giraffes
eat wisdom from the trees.
Like Peter Pan, I'm flying drunk again.
My zebra love, come to the verdant zoo.
We'll drink again to the wildebeest,
and then we'll stay alive deep in the jungle,
while the dinosaurs crash into glaciers, and grow very numb.
I will make you small, green, dew claws.
My desires whelp these small animals, this reticulum
of kangaroos, this pod of whales,
spinning the spinning dark.
Carved out of ferns, and leaves, and hedges, the chunky profiles
of armadillos, the hearts of porcupines.
Drunk, the hedge clipper, sculpting in the park.
The exoskeletons, the funny snouts and tails,
the embryos that lurk inside him,
and that come when he ruminates upon them in his cups.
In they come, when he is snoring in the jail,
spies from the ark.
And the raven hops in time to the soft thirsting
of their golden eyes.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]