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Let no air ever come between you. No clean sheet. No lamplight. No dust. Let the hotel curtain be your guide, the absolute fabric, the craving to get lost like a strong thread. Go blank against one another. Turn blue. That’s day and night. Stop needing your own blood so. Dry up and get in…

They’ll come she says just smear some jelly from your sandwich on the back of your hand and wait how she passes the drowsy hour of math before lunch the initials carved like Braille on the desk a fly alights on her sleeve her wrist they are drawn to us drawn to what is sweet…

November like a train wreck as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire. The sky is a thick, cold gauze but there’s a soup special at Wafflehouse and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,…

I live by the river, daughter to no one. Of course, I want. The formless sea fills every window, always the sleeping gift in my left hand, not how the life was     outlined. The underwater road is obscured, as it should be. Light years     waste away in my body. When my mistress sends…

Your images come to you like the lost buffalo. In the sundown of your fancy, in the slanted town, two men face each other in the street. After the war, we all lived in a ruined city. I wore my black tie every day to class. The night they come calling for you, they don’t…

The moon sent us up this stream— the moon could not be wrong— Pulled upward by that promise, the Snake River Fall Chinook came home already treasoned to fail. There they thrashed, tens of thousands head-to-tail in two days and two nights against the new dam on the river. Relentless even to the final washing…

He was, in those years, the wizard of the place, the state’s most famous seasonal resident, primordial snowbird, genius of machinery in a kingdom whose vegetable dynamos outpulsed anything even his well-greased corporate laboratories might envision, imperator of science swathed in green, cocooned in jungle xylem, this man who would bring light into the darkness…

On Grove Street we talked about writing in a room jammed with bodies, but now no smoke. Everything else was the same including my belief that it would never end. Ken said to Roberta that because they lived in rent- stabilized flats, they had the luxury of writing all hours of the day and night…

Since starting triple drug therapy last week, R.’s barely been out of bed. Every eight hours his watch goes off and it’s time to take the pills. You have to take them with meals, but he’s lost his appetite. He swallows the pills, sits up for a few minutes, then back to bed. Tonight he…