I.   I’m the wave before it breaks the ground before it quakes the maelstrom before it hits the water before it boils the word before it forms.  …

  Hot, but with a breeze,     and the breeze carries something         faintly seen. Small glistenings   against the pines. It is the    …

  Blue jay screams in the almost wilderness— she Wants she Wants she Wants.   Nothing but flames will grow in this wind.   Back and forth the blind mice…

  For months I carried a bluebird. Its breath, dark berries. Its eyes were pebbles. In my pocket, its wings fluttered from time to time. Summer was not enough to sustain…

  [T]hey are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.” - Virginia Woolf, “Craftsmanship”   It really is, your suspicion notwithstanding, always like…

  I’m drinking coffee with Melissa, telling her about an idea for a poem called The Encyclopedia of Small but Significant Gestures,   in which I explore the gesture of…

  Was it a cloud or a pillar of fire that led you lost people through the desert?   And were you lost, or merely uncertain as I feel nearly…

  You must think that I forgot or are neglecting you, which is not at all true,   you are often in my thoughts. How to write you. Polycentric. Brazzaville…

  The sea for miles like the table of God. Our powder blew and the sea rushed in.   The mast’s a burning candle offered And I’m the flame that…

  Some say I no longer wear one, dismissing the slip—and here, we’re not talking panniers, dimity pockets, or pantalets with open crotches but   see:  chemise—so mid-twentieth- century that…

  You are the elbow. You, bone to a point, a rule for movement, marble-   hard and you are palms to pull and pound our only rooms, to palm…

  Shear back the thorns, the thistles, the body   of rosebushes growing along the fence line. Summer will not give   and the dog is digging up rows of…