As we snake up through redwoods into the thickening gold haze, my brother the firefighter wonders how long to get a first responder out here, where the sheer gravel…

  We go to Golden Gate Park to have a picnic. Find a patch that is empty, our clearing. Don’t realize until a ball almost bursts the bottle of Bulleit…

  thunderstorms forming, kids out of school and off to camp, brand new ringtones loaded on phones. Another famous overdose, another fading star on trial, a governor-gone-wild all sexier stories…

  after Edouard Manet   A young woman with a cigarette—perhaps a prostitute! Or maybe she’s a “shopgirl hoping for company,” but either way, she’s not an upper-class lady, sitting…

  It’s what we don’t say that holds us together. In the late afternoon, walking along the Danube we talk about the hills and the color of the water, the…

  In the living room my mother can’t sleep. Past midnight, reading a magazine, she eats her way to the bottom of the plate. A swirl of lithium carbonate has…

  A fire in the middle of the night, my head whipping back to watch the embers warp the black. A light, neither epiphany nor end. In childhood I’d don…

  for Kyle   You died the day the sparrow flew inside the house. We watched it rise to the high windows, query its wings against the glass clouds. A…

  Each door assigned & your name written above the furl of Batman’s cape & a long hall where cells split & not with grace & another sign reading stay…

  …the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. —Marianne Moore   What you first see are the chimney stacks, the moss-covered roofs and then the crosses…

  Two blackbirds cross the motorway to the east. Gorse like saffron, patching up the side of the hill. Darkest green clusters are of heather, sedge. Brown stains where the…