The painted black balls refuse to fit the cannon,
but the paint gives back a radiant glaze of ragged light.
On Trumbull village green suffused with shady ambiance,
the heavy balls hang like grapeshot in the air,
the viney air, the summer air.  Analogy is such a strain.
If you write "God" at the beginning of a sentence,
no one can be sure you meant to capitalize its meaning.
As if it had meaning.  As if you meant.  The shores were Jewish
but the country club needed a beach.  Michael Hoomeydoughno
personally, the North American patient, observes
you glimpse the secretary's ring of basketwoven gold,
Chiron grazing in the meadow behind the soccer field,
oblivious to the white angular uprights;
Charon crab-walking the dark gym floor one dark
November afternoon (under the climbing rope
he resembled a spider on her thread);
Charo shaking her tail feathers to Cugat's rhumba tunes
while F. Scott Dustjacket taps a cigarette against
a silver lighter to tamp tight shag tobacco
Matt Asparagus will later study for portents.  The caddies,
high school students in knit shirts and neat slacks,
play setback in a shady shack or lounge among the bags
and clubs, reading Mad  and Cracked  and sipping cola.
I never will marry, I'll take me no wife.
I plan to live single the rest of my life.
Michael rather than Charon rowed the past ashore,
an archangel in the dark tradition of robes 
and head-coverings, not naked oarsmen in the sticks,
some blackwater backwater five thousand miles from 
the Middle Kingdom, or virtually unreachable from the bronze
demesne of Benin, immigrant rhinos and native American
camels under red felt saddles tasseled with tin cones,
lost logarithms, leather chromosomes, sleep,
sleep, sleep.  I watch civilians on the street
from the crackly basket of a tricolor military balloon
hanging like a misplaced punctuation mark
in the deadly silent sky.  God sends drunks 
with lovely books and unrelated pain, and I am jealous.