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Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise but when she walks in her custom-size narrow bootsshe minces, or half-dances like a pony, the sort of pony who is dear and a little sillyand wears a hat with a ribbon. A little of this and a little of that—lacking a territorial integrity, she slides vertiginously…

By wings whose shapesare but half a heart?     Feathers oiled with     country clubs andgasps of delight? Not for thesethe sandhill craneshakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene,she is the gatekeeper of gibe,     a cement-gray song     edged and pocked in grassyfields, a frock of scarletover her eye, her own letterto time and her maker; a bow, a leap, all a…

I flick a switch—out flashes the light bulb,like God snapping his fingers in my face:Wake up, Pumpkinhead. I’ve been running aroundhalf-naked, with the rest of America,wearing only a credit card and a cashmere scarf.Arf, arf. Yesterday, I went to Circuit City’sgoing-out-of-business sale to revel in the fall of capitalism,but all I saw were the sad…

Even the gods misuse the unfolding blue. Even the gods misread the windflower’s nod toward sunlight as consent to consume.Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Still, you envy the horse that draws their chariot. The wilting mash of air alone keeps you from scaling Olympus with gifts of dead or dying things dangling…

Thierry I am here because it’s too crowded on the other side of this sentence.Take this page—where do I place myself? At the beginning or the end,or in the middle? Or maybe in the corner. I can’t be everywhere, that’swhat I’ve been told my entire life. They say we have a choice, but wheredo you…

At the airport the conveyor bears small yachts shaped like luggageinto the distance, and I am headed, when they let me pass through the X-ray arch, toward home. There is a distancesometimes greater than this between us, since you are in another state—gaseous, solid, liquid, light—and I admitI am often absent lately from whatever is…

I shall speak of the tendency among sane and healthy persons to seeimages flash unaccountably into existence.                                                                                     —Francis Galton This is a tale not of science but of blue. Some say this heat is the worst in history, but history is huge and Idoubt it has never been hotter across the Northern peninsula. Still, the bears…