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If I loved him—I loved him— I cannot remember the whole middle part where the gods never go, they’d be bored. Of the beginning—how many poems to describe his buoyancy, and gaze, and hands— how many times can the act of whispering together be a remonstrance to the underworld? And the end is completely remembered—…

The phones, the long-distance phones are ringing. The satellite phone from the field camp in Kosovo. The lawyer’s phone in a complex in Palo Alto. The car phone conveying a child to baseball practice. In this way the siblings converse and condole much as the now-vanished Carolina parakeets with their sunflower-yellow heads and radiant green…

Outside of town, back on that one country lane, they work down into the ground, pieces of cracked road lie to the sides, small black boulders. Deep brown earth makes a rim around the great opening, a moist lip. Machinery sits on each side, patient yellow creatures. Lights are hung, making the men’s uniforms a…

Lumber me up, my licky bloke, my one so far unseen, my limbered timber boy. What luck to bucky suck till sated, luminous tuneful body to play on, even now long play me on. I hanker for the slow bang of my love, his howl and cheek, shebang, the flaming oh’s of his moany mouth….

When you stood up and walked past the rows of desks and windows, seeing the yellow and green trees you had already admired, praising even the door where you stood before entering, imagining yourself reading passages of sin or love or the earth or moon’s ashen birth— what amazement you must have felt later, looking…

Tacked on the wall, a map of my sad luck, places self-pity has planted its flag. In the bed, my body, a book in its hand. In my skull, a voice reciting the words on the page one moment—an exegesis of a bungled kiss—and then the next enumerating the canyons and cliffs, the familiar indigenous…