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Leaves came and went as men warred over the shape of the table— peace would be talked in Paris, where Ho Chi Minh had been young once, hungry and hunted. Veteran of another war, my father wanted no squabbles at the supper table. What shape should it take to insure that we were out of…

Mothlike, he makes the swallow look slow, separating his flight-feathers as fingers, closing the trailing edge of his wings between beats, and his lyre-shaped tail, from his old, cupped nest of leaves to his later chosen, true, domed nest of reeds. Often he merges with bark of fallen log and insect-haunted least willow, the song…

I arrive again in the right place but with the wrong set of objects: a keyboard with four or five letters rearranged (in a crooked row) so it’s hard to keep things from coming true by accident. The nerves scrape feeling from the heart sac and refer it to skin on the left shoulder. The…

An agony afoot, I burst into peacocks. Reverdy, all afternoon. Nothing is easy. It’s all broken nothing, ambiguous cold. In one poem a horse jumps over a hedge of sparks. The horseman is blue. And a bone or a flower is clouded with silence, everything engulfed in the peripheral. Somehow this produces in me pain,…

The tines I used were basically the same. The line that read, “My blue eggs never hatched,” was fabricated, yarn of passion, play. I never laid an egg. I never lived a past, unmitigated life. (I think.) Of course, there was that time my childhood stopped its beating—Mother sat me down to preach her strictures,…

There’s another man on my block who can’t sleep, I’m an admirer of his insomnia, it’s a tool like a glass of water is to thirst. In his case something like music is made, I know because my insomnia stalks his. Our street is lined with maples and has no streetlight and all the dogs…