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Twilight moves on weightless wrists and runs aground. To strand, to sail along the coast, to coast. When we get there, you want to lie down. To sleep, to spread a blanket across the ground glass of light at the edge. There is moistness under the hair on that nape. Artesian depths of body rise…

We begin with a catalog of all the dead things seen or not seen in the way the eyes turn quickly away and return again furtively (was that a dog or a pile of trash swarming with flies?) The black rat in the stream drowned between two stepping stones the water washing through his coat…

All their sons are gone and my parents sit in their mountaintop kitchen. Language comes and goes like a far-off sound fading with a breeze. One cannot say “speak” and speak. A ground hog finds their cucumbers. In the valley fire finds a building. They call the smoke a scarf. But they know better. On…

If only the nudes weren't so serious, but giggling, like the two little girls holding hands. They ask a woman absorbed by a woman, lit as though from the bottom of a pond, “Who painted the naked lady?” “Titian,” she answers, and the girls, still holding hands, jump up, skip, hooting through the sixteenth century…

The chair breathes for hours. Off in another country, a waiter yells at me—You can't save anyone you can only save food. Plastic bags for dogs. Here's my friend at last back from the bathroom. He breathes like a chair. Save me, for I am green fruit, it is raining, and I shall fall too…

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989 No one asks where I am from, I must be from the country of janitors, I have always mopped this floor. Honduras, you are a squatter's camp outside the city of their understanding. No one can speak my name, I host the fiesta of the bathroom, stirring the toilet like a punch…

paper stars and moon      three tiered houses and their utensils fast heated column of paper money lifted by ghosts the impatient and delighted spark here are two houses crackling to heaven      paper rabbit lantern tinseled and sprung into celebration and from the mud bath the ghosts lay paper rice into their mouths fire dribbling down…