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Deer Isle Kai says, “Here, let me fix that, you don’t know how.” This elegant mechanism, a present from my daughter, topped by its own wind hat, engineered not to turn inside out in Nor’easters or August hurricanes. Ingenious invention of China and Egypt, emblem of rank in remote antiquity, collapsible shade, pampering portable sunscreen…

A postcard from the X, emblem of death or dollar signs like candlelight in eyes, the crux and crucifix, the map the mark, the ink drop spot, the patch stitched in the crotch that holds your snowmobile suit together, objective of your love, known otherwise as architecture, made of point and arc and light, still…

What if we could look at language as matter [as real and outside our imagining as granite or cedar trees] and move inside words, the way particle physicists break into atoms with the force of their own energy and light? To track the intelligent chaos of language by threshing open the word,                        olive pressed…

A little morning of Scarlatti, and prudent flowers, white tulips even whiter in light from the window’s true divided panes, grass, a rufus-sided towhee and invisible fox in shadow, yes, this was witnessed while a second dream went on, a knife slitting through an abdomen and upward to a chest wall, a whole country grimacing,…

Days uncoiling like the hose from her fingers, days measured by the mechanical car buzzing down the driveway. Her boys wrestle for the control box, shriek, their calls tear the air, hush the birds, and send her, with hose, to transmit water against their heads just enough to shut them off. Now only the sound…

Arthur Dove, 1931 I have spent all day with the silver disc of the barn owl’s face embedded in my thoughts & my beloved under general anesthetic, his whole form etherized, calcite laddering his spine, strange thorns in the distinct cave of him. I wring my hands, silly spinsterish fret-motion, I say shoo but still…