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I am ashamed as I try to sleep, counting the wounded and the dead in this old day’s news, the grieving ones they leave behind. Counting stones and bullets, averted needs, the pretty breaths of my family beside me, counting on a world that I don’t trust to keep my children safe. What was I…

—suggested by John Searle’s thought experiment My one bulb may cast more shadows than light (the corners are always lost) but it proliferates in the red and black lips of my four thousand six hundred twenty-three lacquered trays, and I can see well enough to do my job. The room is compact. I can reach…

Poised in the garden just before dawn Souls hover in a trance before the window Or fly slanting and darting through the trees. And down on the plain where the sun Has yet to rise but whose heat roils Upward and turns the night to silver vapor, Souls swarm across the stubbled fields. Now, as…

Still I am not sure which is most vivid— the love now risen from its previous absence, or the future loss it rides like a shadow, the eye’s after-image of a bright light gone. In any case, with its harrowing blades, this fertile line of love already draws through me a beautiful symmetry: The invisible,…

for Gary Holthaus Seven geese, southwest, and seven flat-black ships, converging in the Colorado sky, before the pale haze of early winter, bright and bronze and empty, on a Sunday just approaching noon. I count the birds again: seven. And the helicopters: seven, in a line northeast, their rotors blurred and sounding faint percussion, high…

Though I’ve lived a life and I have lived amongst men and I have Loved this life as an experiment—an act of science And an act of ruth—I’ve kept for this city my last half heart (I lost the other to the chance of art.) And so, stirred of a         loud silence, Slow snow as…

The elevator is full of the swim team. The swim team knows How many goldfish Will fit in a phone booth. The window and its attendant shadows Are not wise. They are an insult To the swim team, Which has God on its side. The swim team knows How to pull a knife on the…

I will be coming up the hill from school in an hour . . . Lena stretches to the clothesline as Carl Is coming slowly back over from the barn . . . Between them the field dips deep and the field Slopes long and half the day, already, is done. She pushes a wooden…

Showered in ghosts his trees sing forked over by wind each inherits a musical gift but the fever’s got by subscription revelry abounds on wet cobblestones of the commuter moon the moon’s new zoo’s main attractions being card-boxed turmoil (say the mobile mind breaks down on its own Utopia Parkway) by Joseph Cornell and softly…