It is to be born into a fragile garden between today’s rain and my left brain   where the artist hangs like one of these colorful characters with nowhere…

  The snow carries the chill of Novocain, the dentist’s Latex fingers that taste of nothing. What Is the circumference of your absence? I play Jerry Butler And Otis Redding…

  Tonight the full moon slips like a coin into God’s own pinball machine.   Auden called it a “clockwork spectacle.” Perhaps he was wrong—just once.   And Victorian Meredith…

  Riding out to the Coney Island end of the line, with a view to look into the third-story world I read about, I stop at Smith-9th   to frame…

Eros   —lord how the loved infuriate, the cat’s fangs in my petting hand, the fern in the fernery grey & limp as old kelp & the woman re-writing all…

  The way boiling water lives in fire Is how a cactus lives in the window. And how a tree runs underground, And how the sun sets over houses.  …

  I have been ridiculous: crying in the street, holding frozen spoons against my eyes, as if they could cure. Months pass with only cloud cover. Tonight, grief lacks the…

—for PJW   So gentle a man, yet so fierce a passion for poetry! I’ve known him to argue   for five minutes together against a misplaced comma or another…

  The moon has left me, my love, but I have my boat.   And if my boat abandons me, my love, my body won’t.   Oh, it knows to…

  She washed her hair with leşie she brewed at home by simmering ashes. She combed her hair in the sun with kerosene from the lamp. She wove her own…

  I used to sneak off with a folding chair down the hill, some evenings, to the edge of the inlet between lakes, and just sit there.   It was…

after Rodin   You never loved me. If it were really me whom   you adored, not just the sound of your own   voice, you should have been able…