KISS, KISS, SAID LOUISE, BY WAY OF A PAY PHONE

To the other who’d been left behind.
The city was unlucky in cloudy and chance of.
Routing the enemy, following a route.

What does it mean, Mary Louise,
that the mall in Midcreek will open in May?
They were getting away

to nature, conveyance as a form of diffidence.
Every avenue, said Ham, still ends at perception.
There is a point, said Louise, when one will act or won’t

even know what she’s missed.
She was wearing a wig and suit of blue serge
and looked somewhat like that section

of a symphony written in the alphabet soup
of C and B-neath. The road was a ribbon
on the bright canyon bed. Clever twin, said Louise,

to those who know how to follow
a scheme that avoids the end of the senses
before there can be a begun. She saw: a blue car leaving

at three; a blue car returning at four; an odd-looking man
leaning against an ornamental Japanese pine.
They stopped at the house on the top of the hill,

lit like a candle-house cake. I hope, Ham said,
there’s a fire station deep in this forest.
Forest? What forest? she said.

Don’t you see—
it’s a fantastic sea where nothing but nothing can save us.