Addictive day starts with the lit-up screen

against the backdropped window, while the street's

still dark, the gray slate roofs oily with rain.

Distraction of four newspapers' front pages

dicked on to spiral into distant windows

and distant, virtual and dulled encounter.

Better to go down to the café counter

(above which, on a television screen,

the same heads talk) and watch, beyond the windows

a drizzly morning's intersecting streets

that used to open into day, their pages

etched with the calligraphy of rain.

One more fall day, whose uncertain rain

is the most probable, least vexed encounter.

From left to right, from right to left, on pages

or posters, paravent or movie screen,

spectators are the spectacle, when streets

unwind their bobbins below open windows.

Addicted, then transfixed behind the window's

bather, slant light, slant fall of rain,

a mystery enacted on the street's

begrimed and glittery parquet will counter

act the dire pronouncements you can't screen

out, the bad news on the daily pages. …