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In the night of the changing year I misplaced winter. Tumbling down with the old sins, the promises, I woke up sniffing. No cares. Walkway splashes sing to my ears of an evening in May. The scent of thirty springs is rising. A full-hipped beauty in green, ripe for the flood, bustles over her scrawny…

Untouchable mother a smirk instead of a smile a ragged lip— I left you kneeling dirty brown water dripping over your hands I took what I wanted: my own arrangements on a clean table under the window lavish chasteness of one rose for the moon a perfect cup and saucer for a dainty tea Your…

Through the soft pulp of farmed pine, the saw moves with the incessant logic of progress. Why stand up when you can fall down? Why be a tree when you can be a house? Here there is nothing to hope for but branches. As the saw works, it whispers of soft flanks weathering in lumberyards….

I mastered the easy ones first. I began with avocado pits and lollipops, belt buckles and keys. I learned that the trick was not to chew but to swallow and savor the wholeness of the thing itself. I nurtured a taste for the outrageous. Goldfish and swords had no allure, nor would I swallow anything…

for Tom What a coincidence. The color of our hair. Ancestral blood. You arriving as I do, our arrival in light. Shine up the pyres now, we can see clear through to the past: one big erasure on the map of Europe. What a common hospitality: a tongue. For example, this dumb lullaby we speak,…

This one does its work by returning over and over to the place where it began until even memory bears no splinters. Flatness, flatness, the plane dreams as it sweeps down every plank envisioning unsown fields, boxcars, Unitarian churches. “Lie down,” sings the plane. “Lie down and be the same as all the rest.”

In bed I’m a mad Hungarian. Propped on pillows, a cup of hot black tea on the night table. I hear a strain of bitter chords a gypsy cart halting. If I could go back that far would I find a small face similar to mine? The crust surrounding a pit of ghetto and merchants…

You think you earned this space on earth, but look at the gold face of the teen-age pharaoh, smug as a shriner in his box with no diploma, a plot flashy enough for Manhattan. Early death, then what a task dragging a sofa into the grave, a couple of floor lamps, the alarm set for…

At the table she used to sew at, he uses his brass desk scissors to cut up his shirt.                             Not that the shirt was that far gone: one ragged cuff, one elbow through;                               but here he is, cutting away the collar she long since turned.                                  What gets to him finally, using his…