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Dear Philip— The rain. It held off for Marni's graduation this afternoon. Yesterday I wrote you but you were two days a dead man, Jon called this morning to say. “Oh No, no,” is this what we always let out? “Oh no,” and “At least he . . .” Well, you did live by force…

Because I'm up in Air Force One I get to wear my gold-braid baseball cap. And stand before the map of New El Salvador explaining which came first our game of chicken or the other guy's. And burst into applause because. But you know what I miss, all by myself like this? The motorized advance…

Bonfires light a ring of spruce bough shelters on the plain. Singing travels around the circle like secrets passed from ear to ear. Buffalo hide. Medicine bag. The dancers toss their feathered headdresses into the dark; hooves tear the air. We hug our knees to our chests with the children and women wrapped in heavy…

A spinster swats a worm on her tabletop. It was heading for the waffles or the coffee. She's read about this in the tabloids, oceanic worms with nerve systems like radio signals. They are blind as ice picks and don't care. They come in the morning when you're barely awake and carve their initials on…

Love no one, work, and don't let the pack know      you're wounded . . . Stupid, disappointed strategies. Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much. Friendless eeriness of the new street — The poem does not come, but its place is kept set.

On her sixteenth birthday Anna ventured outside, leaned one hand Against a tree; a boy across the street Threw a rock at her. In bed Anna liked to finger The wooden beads of her mother's rosaries, Though she didn't pray. At fifteen Anna had seen her mother, Changing the linen, die. Graveside from a chair…

If the trees are alive and I am alive, if the trees are blazing and the seagull — flying between the grass and sun — makes a shadow, if the sky startles me, if my soul is listening, waiting for something to fly from the bony cage of my hands — then how can it…

for Jeffrey You have become the ocean for me now. No body of water, but your body, open over miles and miles of longing. No wave, no sweet sweep of release, but the pitch and thrust of urgency unbroken. No sound of sea or season, but for your voice, deep and full of a promise…

Aged a lot during our talk (you were gone). Left and wandered the streets for some hours— melodramatic, I know— poor, crucified by my teeth. And yet, how we talked for a while. All those things we had wanted to say for so long, yes—I sat happily nodding my head in agreement, but you were…