I've done something to the landscape.
When the young lovers pause, their eyes
too close to focus, their wet mouths
at a loss for words, I muscle in

and slip my hand up her frock.
In truth it drizzles most of the year,
the lanes are all muck and slick rock,

and the peasantry is foul of mouth.
If you want watercolored lakeland,
crag and dale, clouds that gather
and part obedient as metaphor,

you must lend a canny hand.
The countryside is an invention
of stage designers anyway. Phony.

Phony perspectives, frames of cliff
and foliage tease and torment
the eye to rhapsodic loveliness.
So why not sermons in stones?

Why not bring an explosion of sun
into this foggy valley, Matta
and Grifone the Sicilian Giants,

astride their massive stallions—
he in his silver breastplate, she
brocaded, high bosomed, crowned
with a miniature citadel of gold?

I live through each day like this.
It's a habit of tampering, toying
with props, fingering the stops.