She likes to wheel herself because she isn’t fast enough to wake the elf who shakes his hips and calls on us to deck these halls each time I…

  (Yeats)   I went out to the maple tree because a riot was in its head, and flung a Frisbee at the noise, but brought a starling down instead,…

  After surviving the fanfold and admiring your oblique body, don’t be surprised   when a chain of perfect strangers unfurl themselves from the raw material of you and hold…

  for Michael New (1942-2006)   You would have liked it here: in a small city along a river, with the spires of a Gothic cathedral looming above a castle…

  Wasps on the windowsill, and a bolt of silk Unfurling from the carriage torched at the edge Of the last city lost to the insurgents, And a horse neighing…

—in memory of Mahmoud Darwish He hears a neighbor’s charged with treason. The coffee’s cold and the French bread stale. Flies cling to a ramekin of apricot jam. The muezzin,…

  Note the pseudopupils, the caption suggests—size varying from a pencil eraser fleck to an ant’s foreleg, pinpricks in the blue foveal band indiscernible to the untrained eye, nuclei-less whorl…

  The pink lily petals are dried and pressed. They mark pages along with receipts and post cards. The parts we want to remember. You say death does away with…

  I don’t want anyone to fuss over me when I’m dead— just throw my body on a tarp, drag me into an open field, pile pine & balsa wood…

  Christopher Smart knelt on these floors. He praised winter, he wrote Geoffrey on the walls. He shouted   I’m barefoot. I lost my rosary.   Praying in Bedlam used…

  In Mr. Rodriguez’ high school World History class, a lecture about the crushing stress on ordinary citizens—through poor harvests, through taxes on the very salt and wheat needed for…