and the clouds keep coming   and the brook is overflowing   and raindrops keep falling   on my head but it’s no longer   the same tune and…

  Solstice dark, four-thirty. Gray rain on the gray cedar shingles, salt box slope. Why do we come home? Dark chocolate Raisinets—long matinee on Scottish monarchs, heavy-handed with the blood…

  Dry bright. The self’s asymmetry with its surroundings—squirrels deadlifting pinecones heavy with sap. Ponderosa sad. Steak buffet sad. The snakes don’t want to kill you, but will—Erin’s boyfriend calls…

  Don’t say there is raw fish on the table a boning knife.   The sun is leaving the broken boughs.   With you in the black hole of object…

  There were times we lost track. That’s for sure. One season came with sugar runs for the bees. Another found us coupling at the foot of a mountain like…

  No, not a cartoon villain, but the only one left to make champagne fermented in a barrel. Even in California, no one wants to spend the time on such…

  The difference is between seeing and looking. By painting   artificial eyes, I can’t allow people to see, but I can change   how they look. As a child,…

  Like you, they’d heard the stories. They stood by a founder’s statue in Faculty Glade. Terms— institute, benefit—were tossed at them. Nothing about conquest, or captives. No questions. Attention…

  This spring we planted again, turned the earth and pushed the seeds into the ground with our thumbs just deep enough, then covered them with the compost loam that…

  I, Your mirror, lie in shards.   When the color left my cheeks, You   left too.

  —after the 1976 Hindi film Laila Majnu   Death is not so cruel.   Does the nightingale not see the bleeding rose, how she tears her collar, her very…

  Look! God descends+++ like fog upon the city, +clouding mirror, horizon— +offering little more than the illusion +of dream. ++++The parched ++hold their tongues +++to the air, ++++heavy with…