Today

In the morning, we listened to the doves, if that's what they were, trooing in a stand of plane trees.
It was her opinion, strongly held, that communism was not a failed idea, but a failing of humanity.
The ice cubes made smoke on the side of her glass.
We agreed only on the exact sound of the rain in certain season.
I told her that it was essentially Calvinist then, or something like it.
That "isms" had peculiar tendencies that reflected the institutions they sought to replace.
She had fake eyelashes that were long and strange.
I reminded her that that wasn't how people wrote poetry anymore, line by line.
Images, I told her, were the thing. Thin strata of clouds--skies, janitorially blue.
The best sort of poem, I reminded her, winds up being about itself.
Of course, I'd never written a poem before, and she'd stopped listening to me when I said the thing about strange relationships between ideas and totalities, if that is, in fact, what I'd said.
We were both drunk by then and listening again to the doves,
their voices--thin reeds swimming through the trees.
We were united, at least, in this.