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It's two am and I awake feeling you've just left some small diner. I imagine wind swinging through the door, voices closing behind you. I remember your last employer saying you've left for he doesn't know where, a woman in a motel angrily waving an unpaid bill; I've been content most of my life with…

Ignoring your poor prognosis, we set grief aside and at dusk behind the Met climbed slowly towards the obelisk where, resting a while, we might in time's pinched frame lavishly survey spring's blossoming. You were so eager for smell— nose in the first bloom at hand— like the hummingbird with his shrewd apparatus you drank…

The Capitol dims and gives itself to snow, and the trees turn their white necks away. Couples loom, pause, and lose themselves to words, long love, turning to each other. Lately, I've been losing you in weather, not pretty thimble domes but lack and need We try to reconstruct the scene, the park, then snow…

There's no moon and it's a curse, my heart beating slow like a bad accident. We're searching for Bill's bird dog in the reeds and it might as well be bones I part with my hand, bending over the long pale grass my eyes aching like thin tails of light the dory lamps leave on…

The night my sister wiggled into her black sheath and shielded her first corsage, I took a deep breath and learned about love: how sweet the flower, how the delicate blossom would bruise. I don't remember the boy's name, if my sister had a good time, only a new kind of sadness that was all…

The words I try to write to you, pressing The pen against your silence, against your silence Fail. I should send you The blank pages, with their blue lines So near the surface (the places You let me kiss you, inside the elbow, The back of the knee. . .), or I should lie to…

(Letter to Gary in St. Paul) Silenter, emptier, never. The sky's overcast, your weather's now mine. I am troubled in a hundred places— And contradicted, contradicted— By the dull light.      Polyphonic weather, Eminentest mood-tinker, sensitivest Most biological face of the physical Globe, least durable, least endurable: Accelerate my ascent and erosion, Erode my nascent ascents,…

It's last call when a man you've met asks if you'd like a black russian. All night, he's talked sports and half- listened to you. Still—he has a lean body and luxurious beard and you like lean bodies and luxurious beards. So you nod and take little sips of vodka and kahlua. Sandwiched in a…

We are not there now, we are never Driving into the fog (in love but, having decided This is wrong, not touching) On our way to Stinson beach. Taking the hard way, anyway, There were road signs, CONSTRUCTION AHEAD DETOUR, into a mist that became Progressively heavier until, at last, It was almost—caught in your…