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When I think of you, you disappear in stages, As if I were paralyzed below my heart And wore, like a blanket, a thousand pages Of you on my lap, who come apart In the slightest wind, and disperse Like leaves. I trade you for the universe, Which holds me back When I lean over…

Like that answer written on a trip that after makes no sense, we remember before birth, but cannot force it to the clumsy breath of this wet hurt of a joy we are now. So let that big boy go and find your tribe to ride with. We spilled the apple juice long ago. I…

On the Schuylkill Expressway, in the midst of a snarl of traffic, a truck from N.Y.C. pulled up alongside, with red filigree appearing through a film of grit in swirls like an ice cream sundae: “Coconut Don Fu Delight,” the fading billboard explained, evoking “tasteless bean curd with a white chewy sweetness of caramelized coconut,”…

Peeking for hours into the fire, I find the faces staring back— marching cities rise and fall. Still as stone I sit, practicing death. My machine of flesh hangs lightly. Our body’s noise keeps us sleeping. Later we arise into dreams, and awake to Jacob’s ladder. At death we graduate. There the slow-mo stomp of…

Not to arrive and not to ever know how to arrive or how to live even here on Utopia Parkway in Queens. This is for the Soap Bubble Sets and the Sun Boxes and for time that moves like a silent film through a projector and for the eyelids of the blind and for those…

Above the roof, above the pine glade which lines the road to work, the moon stays. Your day's wood churns into powder, is binned in barrels on the back lot. Mornings, you walk past rows of empty barrels, rims of their lids brightened by tall field lamps. The moon follows you. When you feed tree…

Years later, when a voyager sends back Your picture, the letters and the map, I feel as if I'd travelled there myself. You've come down to greet me On your private shore, to tell me All that's happened—how, in secret, Your island has become a wonder. Its sheer escarpments fill the glass— Its vast features…

for Elena When I was driving through Wyoming past fields of just-overturned earth black in the noon sun and past thousands of cows totally at home in the open, I stopped the car to stop moving and got out to stand among them and I said nothing in English or Swedish. Now I want to…