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My senses tired      and turning toward sleep, your shoulder sleeping      distinct in my hand. My thoughts disordered      and lapped in fur.

I am never home when he knocks his speculum against my breastbone. It would be fair to say I have developed an immunity against his furtive questionings and gougings. All our interviews are conducted through the keyhole which reduces or enlarges him to a button with a hyphen of thread linking two black nostrils. He…

                 Like you I drive my ten thousand American miles a year burning fossil fuels (conversion            to a ton or two of carbon)            but maybe unlike you I peer into my rearview mirror imagining air      filled with insects & plants maybe                              Triassic dinosaurs                  turtles Devonian dragonflies…

Her heels tapped on the tiles and she knelt at the money-box in the candle-light beside me, at the Body with woman feet. A spear at her whisper pierced my side, her head bent, her meat sweet.

New York, January. I am in the act of reaching out a hand to put a letter in the mailbox. The letter is a request to an old acquaintance (old now, perhaps; he certainly seemed old to me twenty years ago) for advice about a book I am contemplating, a gathering of recollections about my…

In his “Heiligenstadt Testament” Beethoven— let me start over— Joseph Jefferson etched into his desk with a switchblade the legend WHY THE FUK AM I DOING HERE? then underlined it, then inked his question in with ballpoint blue and red. For the sake of his transcendent art, Beethoven hoped “to endure to the end.” Joe…

At a well beside the way I alighted and put down my lips to the water: You, lifting your face like a thirsty thing to mine. I think I know you well. Of character retiring, with eyes open inward, careful of your appearance; settled in your habits, restless in disposition, best left alone. What matter…

I In the “restored medieval house—sensational views” we've rented for March and April, one of the first things I become aware of is a strange crowding jostling my sleep. Thick-walled interiors go weirdly garish, floodlit by a multiplicity of dreams, ungenerous dreams that cluster packed as hanging garments elbowed, shouldered through in a narrow, fetid…

In the duplication center I xerox a hundred pages of the usual stuff, you know the stuff. I xerox maybe a branch's worth, maybe a small lower branch of Georgia loblolly pine: evergreen scent of toner, & when I close my eyes, I see the long needles of light along my branch. Sometimes, the stuff…