other animals

I decided I would give up
writing the musical about
Charles Guiteau and the prose-poem book,
Twice as Nice as Mice on Ice. Who
knows what’s best and what’s a mistake

nearly every bit of gold I’ve
chased has curled to a brown leaf in
my little claw but I’ll give those
old groans some sound and rough shapes and

padding for their feet as they find a place
and sing them to sleep if they let me and
maybe after years of shuffling

we’ll have a little machine that
sweetly encircles it all