The cat, white, with a yellow back, ate a broken little lizard on the roof. Her paw was around the lizards head, and she had eaten half its body - the front. There was one little spot of thick blood on the white plaster patio.

A month later, the lizard's black and shrunken head was still there, boring now, but impossible to remove, eyes long since turned glazed and white now gray and shriveled like dried currants or peppercorns in a rattle. Snow came all at once, and buried it, and when it melted in spring, the head was gone also. We were a little sad to see it gone, and said so, and the cat too seemed to be suffering a loss in its own way, staring at the other roofs rather than at the cars and people below, lying in corners when there were rays of sunlight on the rugs, mewling quietly to itself at all times.

Here was something new. He touched the wall where a painting was done from a stencil of three rabbits running in a circle.
His hand took away a little white paint dust, and he rubbed his three fingers on his pants leg.
There was a pair of busted chain links on a daffodil growing from a  crease in the pavement. They were rusting where they touched the plant: from dew.
Two men in old jeans were sitting on milk crates over a board game and one spoke softly about something else and the other looked upwards and crossed himself and they kept playing.
A pair of brown trousers kicked on a clothesline crossing the street above alongside a white bed-sheet and cloth diaper and a sheer blue blouse.
He moved around until the sun was behind the blouse, so the sun was blue. Then the blouse blew up and the sun went into his eyes.
He pulled his three fingers along a chain-link fence until they felt numb, and a dog barked from a couple yards over.
There was pigeons circling a crumbling piece of a doughnut and a rat looked at them from a cardboard box.
A young man with his shirt buttoned low walked past, proud of his hairless chest, daring anyone to see.
An little boy on his stoop had finished a bowl of something, and hit the tin bottom of the bowl with his spoon whenever he saw something.
When he walked past, the boy saw him, and hit his little bowl.
All the while, cars were driving past, though not very often. They seemed to be hot in the heat the same as everything else was.
A fat man in a sleeveless shirt ate a steak at a wooden table with a white tablecloth in an alley. His mouth was full while he was being mad at someone on a black phone, the curling cord of which was stretched tightly, disappearing through a door. He slurped wine and choked and was mad.
He slowed down as he passed a building where a woman he knew had lived, a long time ago now.
A condemned gas station with wooden crates broken around a dumpster and pallets leaned up against a wall.
Under the shadow of the pallets a man wearing lots of sweaters slept or was dead.
A sheet of newspaper tumbled past making big circles. It was car advertisements.
He reached his house at last: a room with a sink and a stove and a table and chair and a flower in a glass, a room with a mattress and a window and a bookshelf.
He lay down on the bed in a diagonal strip of light.
It swung across him as he slept, growing larger, then disappeared into the opposite wall.

Milk billows into Clay's coffee like submarine smoke from a fire in the earth. Clay wonders at the memory in his youth, when a boat burned in the night on a motionless lake and the fire rose upwards in actuality and poured downwards in a dream. Where is the memory?  Does something billow upwards from the milk invisibly?

Clay wonders, and soaks his buttered roll in gray coffee wondering, as the baker lifts the open book and reads the poem there.