Notice
the Pope’s
white skin beneath the red velvet robe.
Contemplate the thin papery silhouette

After limb snap and tree crash, months
of air filled with sawdust and the sounds
of wood chippers and log loaders­: a mountain
shorn,

in five miles hail becomes sunlight
in one week wood becomes bees
80 years tween first and last breaths
parts of lungs never visited

When lightning wallowed in the orchard's lap – / that raw, sudden violence from the clouds almost / offhand

The same words / In the same sequence, / Everywhere we go.

The same people, / Echo pretense / About everything we know.

It's monopoly and / you're the banker / or craps and it's / your right hand

At least the scarecrow realized
he didn’t have a brain.
He wanted one because he
recognized / that brains

Remember that timewe reclined in the carand your own wordssplit you in two? It was kind oflike when that cooking show ladywe

I stood tall at thirteen, / they asked me to kiss you / goodbye, it was what / you needed,

And all the trembling shadows, the waylaid verses, how darkening they become me now as I lean over this page, the shadows

Like a mermaid’s nipple denied

        the sea’s lesser chill,
        we harden.

        We tighten

Happily resigned
To being
Mostly unnoticed
You somehow find
A small patch of light

I remembered you last week
leaning on the front gate
hair left in a photo album.
Fingers thicker than January wind.

The Hurt Red-faced, open-mouthed–a silent scream in front of me–you press your small hands to your sides. At six, you live a

Rogue Sparks Coming this way is cigarette ember, put out on metal receptacle ridge, wetted down with ocean air and admiral fell

Snow and Crocuses 1.       Snow and Crocuses       Thanksgiving ahead, and first snows, snows and crocuses, Wordsworthian spring, implying daffodils. But first there’ll

The Songbird Market Beijing, a man with the faith of ages Turns to offer a courteous reception. We have come to see

Come Back I will paint you over. I will revise each line. I’ll stand immersed in the dregs without a coat of

Munitions Magnanimity The targets for the tolerant came with a gun rack and delayed viral police how-to videos: A ticking clock mock-calm

Prophesies The white blossoms fallen to the furrow rise again and swirl on March breeze past branches bearing the green buds of

More Like Horace Under a green and wilted sky, the heat softens and obscures me. Too slack to eulogize my cousin, who

If you take the edits, take the critiques, to better bloom in season and embrace the wind that robs you of your

News From North Country   The bright-eyed buxom broadcaster in thick makeup her mother never quite taught her to brush on correctly suddenly engulfs

I Curse Thee While standing on your head. Like peanut butter. From Carlsbad Cavern. I curse thee in milk. By the string

growing old at once sober inside the thought of the time you stood on a black cliff, over a black desert, in

­­­­Peccadillo The church bells ring each hour precisely three minutes too soon, and everyone in town shrugs off that resounding, persistent defect,

I forgot all about that photo. Darkrooming away, and you suddenly upghosted through the developer bath. I apologize. Nobody should have to

The Fawn Found dead in the neighbor’s yard a humid morning in July. The flies already at its eyes, its neck bent

Too much August; it must be parceled night by night ingested in slippery hours. Outside the theater we find ourselves lost, wander

Egeria densa clogs sloughs, especially during low water. Love is a lie the cup tells the coffee for the mouth. Even the

Excavations 3 A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem.

One Moment in the Middle of Things Virginia Beach, the late 80s – dying already. A pale imitation of its former self,

An apple seed is stuck to a midnight tree branch. It swells and seeps red honey, sticks close to trunk-hollow and bird’s

Avihs || Vishnu Mornings || they disperse || beyond || the corn Fields, || separately. ||Sunday She || throws Her partner’s computer

Folds in an ancient fuselage orchestrate an arrangement of accents. Each accent is an accident. A moist white shirt like a waiting

Dead Women in Old Stories Above the hills a starry slate       the lights} on the coast                       a necklace weight              

Curls are brass like a trumpet, you eye me with the snare of your iris, I watch as Coral roars with the

How disappointed the first flyers must have been to finally rise above the feathery white heavens and not find themselves surrounded by

  View A white petal falls as the bee drinks the Mandarin bloom then moves on. Purple and red tin pots with

At the Corner At the corner of Division & Reclamation where the town is split between chaos & choice, the edge where

  Meeting the Resistance In her twenties during World War II she joined the Netherlands resistance and cycled out to meet newcomers

I want an image of Thespis commissioned from an ordinary block of stone. Done by a craftsman who seeks my approval and

Boundaries Lucy, boundaries might be made of Roman stone walls or hedges, but they’re boundaries all the same. I would walk through

1. Revisionist Ministry of the Martians Seared almost scorched, rolling potato eyes and broccoli heads now dead, this medicated dedicated bougie meditator’s Sternoed

Henry Miller’s Typewriter How did you know that I dreamt about Henry Miller’s typewriter last night? Stolid gray Remington, with a bloodshot

1 At the window, last night’s words, ashen Against the glass Black petals in the vase, delicate As the hour fading from

Miss Dolly Bumfrey We bear Muscat To your sick by traction. Making headway at that driving test Was the needles up-and-up. Annihilating

Rae Armantrout: I put a glose on you Habitat-themed enclosure. Zen-inflected mug. Around the block dogs bark at absence.   Habitat (entire

  How I Like My Women I like my women slight and frail, bones hollowly light, ribcages pressed like prison bars against the skin.

you ask me how I occupy myself in my dreams well, if I see one I see the rest I am not

The Forsythia in Bloom Suddenly in the early spring evening the forsythia bush is aflame with light, a monastery with hundreds of

Milton’s Well Predestination stopped her on the road, speeding in some overcommitment, racing impetuous down green skylines, pushing the envelope of the

For Fred (Veteran’s Day, November 11th, 2004) We miss you, Mr. Rodgers. You told us straight. You were not purple Mr. Rodgers,

1. I will say our secret… a stone holding its own weight we were lovers holding each other warm in the unfolding

  By Jupiter! By Bacchus!: Against Humility In the black ooze of the sky, where golden spangling stars alight, Jupiter, alone at

Pieta, Detroit He’d been dead an hour when she came, Ambulance waiting, no hurry now. Her oldest boy. She cradled him, Lifeless,

Daylilies At Night Lilies which open half-sullen pods in the night As if lightning bugs, the torso’s involuntary Lucent flash, and then

For That One True Sentence Joyce had bouts of poverty. Poe died dead broke. Federal writers got a New Deal. Remember Hemingway

Advent (The Song of Aldan) I stand with the trees, as they wait for the rain. I dance with their leaves, as

  The Midal Charm In a white canoe The river takes her home Tired and alone With her chin on her knees

Where The Land Moves On Forever 1. Siringitu, the Maasai named it, the sepia expanse of grassland, and marshes that stretches to

  Mis En Scène: A Wet Season The graceless way in which you wooed me positions itself, transfigures itself into a scene

Memento Fr. 1 Aotearoa is the savage place, seeding A heap of broken images, mixing Mortuary photos with life But this went

The Dead Zone North from Kiev, empty roads   The light of other summers opens among the pages. In the photograph, your

i. Picture Seville, prudent with orange-groves. The sun plays like a gnossienne beneath the trees, a tormented harlequin writhing on the fine

Eight Months On Time, tidewater near, headlong has ripened you to this glowing fullness, clumsy in dormant love. Nothing can take you

the trembling that day in iran you weighed a honeydew’s weight when you first took thick milk from your dune-gold mother, purblind

TO SIDNEY’S DEFENSE The erected wit with its complete set  of screws and mock I-beams and moist whimsy fluid in its jests,

i. her, one perspective, is secular and simple with blue plastic eyes and split thumbprints. and, in a word her is ambiguous like

A PACIFIC VAGRANT And so, in travel, I made my mind treasonable in every way, In treason to say I had eloped

TWAS it was was a translucid partition between the consciousness here below: forfeiting all things-light she goes back over the world of

Map of America trace the pacific coast with your hand feel the moisture on your fingertips crossing the Missouri the storms off

We’d recommend them to anyone— As nice, but pricy (which is a lie)— Took our breakfast on the Lowes’ Ephesian patio by

Beyond St Catherine’s Hill, the long chalice of river sluices through the city, canals Romans cut dividing the Itchen into die-straight races.

All the itinerant shadows of a man’s quiet hope dissected and his guts laid open for the crows. But see the place: