The aperture of dawn breaks 
over the government lake 
embalming our long apprenticeship 
to dust stalled in the tertiary gloss. 
The scrutiny of a man between needs. 
The wanting less to be oneself 
than to hold one’s place— 
to insist sincerity is only 
the desire to have said 
what one has said. 
The rooms replenish themselves 
with a stable of objects: 
an apple core browning in the drain, 
button shirts hung in the limpid forms of bodies elsewhere, 
in a stable of rooms which relay their tedium 
like figurations in a language made of a single word. 
The city remains and the city is grammar.