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I. My father believed this was the worst of all possible worlds: he yearned for Australia. This was what he saw: land. That was all. Why he didn't pine for Colorado or Guam I'll never understand. I know nothing of his life except for the details: married at nineteen, left college a year later. He…

Amid our many complaints the president heads a new world order      beginning to broadcast. Her skin is never my skin.      It is where we cross over to whatever is in store. Her dream is anchored to the pilings,                  sequences of a goddess talking softly to her boat for a long time. In my…

I.                  When my brother died, a stranger                        drove his gray flocked coffin none of us chose, across the country                                    to the cemetery plot. On top of the box were propped            someone else's flowers, dead a day sooner. Brown-edged, they stank,                        …

The walk home is later and so it happens in darker light. Such a wind on the face, on the glamorous graveyard, the city with its bronze horses and their men, and the white stone shrines light up at night like jewels. The air is less supple, less fecund here. The bats are out. In…

Female in the afterlife, Rimbaud, photographed sits, beautiful in the waste                  (a dress, a chair a tent among junked cars). How lovely the feminine muscles of his arms But he is relaxed. No longer does a human soul,            like a shining noose,                        trail from heaven (still, absentmindedly, he reaches…

As the floor tilts, the hanging lamp dangles at an odd slant toward the kitchen's star of-Bethlehem walls and I know the stillness, the belligerent pace, the public shadows on our lawn and the way she stood at the edge of the orchard, transparent in her nightdress as the bus crept up the drive. The…