Score for a Spectacular

The peeping Toms advance onto their balconies.

Mosquitoes rise, Lolitas run baths.

I was a girl among girls in the locker room.

Blonde legs. Blonde books. Lore said:

We took turns with our eyes to a rifle scope.

A champion undressed, we were waiting.

His pocked back in the crosshairs.

Look in your compact for the transit of Venus.

It was a chink in the wall:

The royal wedding       The assassination       The half-time show

flickering into our living rooms.

E coli observed through a keyhole.

One hundred thirty thousand pounds ground beef

reloaded into trucks. Its silence and heft

conveyed like sleeping children down the turnpike.

The mayor attends the symphony wearing night-vision goggles

while the sitter keeps a finger-frame on the crib.

Kettledrums heroic in green.

Every time I pick up my opera glasses the towers are mid-collapse.

On my seaside vacation, they are burning again

in the keel of a glass-bottom boat. My face and the minnows

alight, your open mouth like an oil slick. You are beautiful

when considered in terms of guns versus butter. I love you when

(and only when) you are the single eye of the panopticon

and I am the six thousand prisoners.