I bought a dress with lemons printed on it,

and I thought of Lou reading “In Dreams.”

I thought of near-rhymes in a hundred-and-twenty-word language

as I sang a three-shift cipher in time with a two-step tune;

I thought of my twenty-eight months straight of long hothouse cucumbers,

and of the cincuenta años de puro ritmo moving my feet.

I sensed a rich-smelling wind swelling up from the southwest, a bicentennial one,

and an afternoon descending by degrees, Delmore-style.

I thought of Charles Demuth, digit-dreamer,

and of your little car, bedlam-bound,

and of Puuc,

and of Cheech,

and Ranchito,

and of de Certeau’s home on the range.

I burnt korban olah where my mother burns sage

and prayed like I told you I do: every night.

I prayed for the fat-fingered children of Dún Laoghaire,

branding the tidepools’ tormented with triskelion palmprints,

and for all the female patients, that they might evade felony,

and for all of God’s children, that they might bond with their stepfather

and forget absent Daddy, out of the picture,

and for boomboxers,

beat-bringers,

summertime-flingers,

moldy peach molar-rollers

and the shit-caked Divine.

I prayed most piously of all for the whole rank of people

I knew only as rebus puzzles, faces parsed to mean more than a roster of names could.

Suffering visions of Shickel under the blacklight

I wondered Can’t you hear my heart beat,

you Radio Chinchilla, Mr. Easy-to-Be-Around;

I wondered How many ghosts are there in this world?

I came up with no answers;

you rang.