Early deliveries no one receives.

Here's wishing the rain had gone on longer, that the beat of windshield wipers had continued to delight my renegade

eye, the goldenrod of taxis gone on to flower against the uniform dun March morning, the facades

time dressed in mourning. Now it comes back, last night's dream: you were disguised as that blind sage

whose detective also had a way of divining patterns in opaque terrain. And since this rainy moment cannot recur

it's transparent that no one coming after us will solve the puzzle of the UPS boxes hurled pelf mell by men in brown

synthetic outfits onto wet, black asphalt, one marked INVOICE ENCLOSED, the other, HANDLE WITH CARE.

Here's wishing this pyramid were not attached to the grimpen-tinted van--oblong monolith emblazoned with obsequious gold lettering-:

like the bold young boy roller-blading Broadway alone in the ratty dawn, scant trace of a cryptogram "o k w t me" ("don't fuck with me"?)

across the red (salmon-pink from the many washings?) papyrus of his jersey.

Why pick this boy's silence out of a crowd? Because he scorns too much self-concern? Recognition

is everything. But the water laving the wrought-iron rail of the Saxony Hotel as I cross

the cross street has a lovely, lulling, momentarily calming ... something ... I don't want to end.

And this downpour is blessedly outside introspection's damaged arteries. But so are the boxes, all shapes and all

sizes, no two alike!, piling up around the--driverless--truck, whose gilded grid, magisterial

from the Equator to the polar cap, is topped by a topmost box topped by a copy of today's

New York Times--if my eyes do not betray my sight as I'm forced to squint-: ATOMIC BLASTS, or Atomic Blasts?

Poet, essayist, and translator, Mark Rudman is the author most recently of: "The Nowhere Steps," a long poem; "Rider," which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1994; "Realm of Unknowing: Meditations on Art, Suicide, and Other Transformations"; and "The Millennium Hotel," all four with Wesleyan University Press. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 1996/97.