Who’d have thought this wine made from the flowers of wild gorsewould turn out so well? How were the flowers ever convinced to give up so muchof their coconut aroma, their slick & electric yellow? On the radio a tenor is bouncinghis voice around Purcell’s baroque arpeggios & this is the fourth clear dayin a row & that strong light is throwing shadows over the ground like gothic script.I’ve been walking around the city being beautiful & I have photographsto prove it (I’ve learned, recently, to make myself beautiful by a certain sweep of the fringe, orforcing a correspondence between my nails & my lips by bringing each to the same pitch of red).To think I’ll have to go home later & try to sleep while my skin hums with all the heatit’s absorbed these hours spent marveling at everyone’s tulips—their heads are like little novas! Often I envy the Scandinavians for their months of sun,unpunctuated. I think I want some kind of salad. I want to feel like a real boy, sometimes.