From “Empirical: IV”

A concrete table and chairs set back from the road

at the edge of a playing field — vacant, wide with light — 

where I step into the background of my imagery, this place

in which it is all still to happen, the table set — 

plates and side plates, ranked cutlery, napkins

in their rings, long-stemmed glasses under a hanging lamp — 

the same vine wreathes around its shade as is enchased

in the lion-foot salt cellars, turret pepper pots — 

Landscape with torsos sunk into mahogany — 

pictures by the window, half-drawn blinds, a centerpiece

grapes of wire and jade-colored glass, their bloom of dust — 

soon I will sit and eat — Now strangers wake in their houses.

One by one they have vanished into that blank

behind their names, this place in which the room rebuilds itself

furnished each time with more of my unreality — 

The stone heaps lie around me and nothing is mine — 

A concrete table and chairs and gray-green weeds persisting

here and out of cracks in bitumen along the fence line

where a warehouse backs onto the street, self-seeding

at the verge of what the mind makes scenes as if to say

what the future will keep of this place will be its innocence,

a hunger as undeliberate as rain —