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for Robert Philen I saw all these things the moment contained (what the light proposed), a camellia bush in thick red bloom all January, some flowers browning on the dormant lawn (still green): they smelled like something afternoon; wax baskets of evergreen mistletoe hung from bare limbs of a southern red oak, verdant parasite on…

It’s really cold in here now, easily forty below something, and half the class is asleep. Snow dazzles in the windows, makes a cake of each desk. It’s really cold in here now. I’ve been lecturing on the same poem for twenty-six hours and half the class is asleep. I want them to get it….

translated by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes   No matter how much he pondered the Virgin’s pregnancy, how much his thoughts went back and forth, his heart and troubled soul couldn’t figure it out. —traditional Filipino verse narrative of the life and death of Christ   Chisel, plane, and hammer, to you I’ll whisper my bitter…

Something in this long commute is chilling. The street between Karlin and Nessen City’s broken, carnage is literal and fresh: raccoon, a deer new since yesterday, crow, loose feathers desultory in the jet stream of a car. This afternoon a mallard looks more human in death than he ever did bobbing on a pond: face-down,…

Gone, the quiet of toads. We used to see them half-burrowed in the powdery dirt. I liked their eyes, the nictating membrane. They seemed wry, a little smug. Like a girl who is double-jointed. Demonstrating that. At recess. Gone the articles, how they coddled their nouns. Or, sometimes, volunteered them. Did I mention the car…

The powerlessness of sleep to transport two men along a sand-blown road. The shrapnel keeps popping out of their bodies and the Humvee keeps crashing into the guardrail. The escarpment fills in with blood. The lieutenant rides shotgun, fallow with the land. He notices the flamingo thin stems of the frangipani, shredded in wind, unstitchable….

The souls we carry hunger for our light. They who feel unfortunate, close in on the fields, convene around happiness. They hear the sound of it like laughter, on roads, through rain-blurred trees, the smell of it boiled through bones and cartilage, the taste of earth deep and darkly rooted. Drawn to those sleeping skin…

Moments connect like iron filings on a magnet, Not by the clock moving forward But by likenesses of mood; the way the sun Strikes a plate glass window At dawn unites all such dawns, the way love Brightens the face of your lover after Even the briefest absence, the same Knotty dilemma, whether day or…