A Report to an Academy

And so among the starry refineries and cattail ditches of New Jersey his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow. When he next looks up from Kafka a blur of green sanatorium tile flows by then presto, Port Authority, full daylight. He has been cheated of the river, dawn, a considered fingering of his long and polished rosary of second thoughts. Is it any wonder children are born weeping? Out to Eighth Avenue to walk twenty blocks home to her sleeping curve beneath a sheet. He cracks three eggs into a bowl and says to each, Oh you got trouble? The yellow yolk is his, the orange is hers, the third simply glistens, noncommittal. Except to mention Kafka's restlessness before his death, his trips from spa to spa to country house to sanatorium, and that she's awake now, sweet with sleep sweat, patting her belly's taut carapace and yes hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister how was your trip and what have you brought us, and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage, the poem has nothing further to report.