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Bird shit streaking down the backs of Adirondack chairs, a naked woman sketching. Is the point of art to know what hands will do? For a moment she looks up, then resumes.

So autumn comes to an end with these few wet sad stains Stuck to the landscape,                                        December dark Running its hands through the lank hair of late afternoon, Little tongues of the rain holding forth                                                                   under the eaves, Such wash, such watery words . . .   So autumn comes to this end,…

Tenderly she would take them down and fold the arms in and fold again where my back should go until she had made a small tight square of my chest, a knot of socks where my feet blossomed into toes, a stack of denim from the waist down, my panties strictly packed into the size…

The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children.     A few nights ago A man swears he saw me pump gas With the children At a convenience store Like a punchline you get the next day, Or a kiss in a dream that returns while You’re in the middle…

But later, to teach myself humility I worked exclusively with breath, with the insubstantial, with what does not last, not leave a record behind those streamers, those ribbons we trail from our bodies banners, flags of the living excrement of the mouth and lungs, though we do not like to think that the spirit is…

Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in Charlottesville, Umbrian sackcloth,                                  stigmata and Stabat mater, A sleep and a death away, Night, and a sleep and a death away— Light’s frost-fired and Byzantine here,                                                                aureate, beehived, Falling in Heraclitean streams Through my neighbor’s maple trees. There’s nothing medieval and two-dimensional in our town, October…

A Mexican migrant worker was kept sedated in an Oregon mental hospital for two years because doctors couldn’t understand his Indian dialect. Hospital staffers ruled Adolfo Gonzales was mentally ill because “he couldn’t speak to us to tell us he wasn’t.” These are the words you did not have to tell them who you were,…

Probably God laughs at us, down here, entranced As, to quiet us, He tosses down another season, And we ooh and ah—like infants silenced By the jangling of keys above a playpen— At the all-effacing green or white or gold, Or even something small: a stem, a robin, A brittle smattering of stars across a…

October in mission creep,                                            autumnal reprise and stand down. The more reality takes shape, the more it loses intensity— Synaptic uncertainty, Electrical surge and quick lick of the minus sign, Tightening of the force field Wherein our forms are shaped and shapes formed,                                  wherein we pare ourselves to our attitudes . . ….