Dear Thunderbird,

Letters should he confidential but I’ve no confidences

so might as well write you a poem in the new form

only the initiate can tell from prose. Hello.

Hello Kenneth. Hello Janice. Hello Katherine. So you can scream like

power brakes. I hear from the Moustache by way of Jane. Grand.

It’s “fragrant May” (Leopardi)

(I’m typing in a pool of my own sweat)

and New York is blindingly beautiful

thanks to the aluminum people

who are not cast of Canadian metal - they have weekend

sunburns and suits bluer than heaven you can wash in the sink

yourself, even as you and I. What they got

we haven’t got is a lot of aluminum.

You run up some beams and snap

the aluminum whosies into place

and glass - sparkle! toward sundown

going east you have to walk horizontal. Except

the House of Seagram, austere and smoky

as a molten topaz. And now for personalities on parade,

while vending Picasso catalogues at MOMA

-that haven of have-not poets - I heard a guard say.