A red-tailed hawk in its coat of folded wings perches on the peak of my neighbor’s roof, in its talons the clasped prey, some mammal or other—some pest one…

  Some black words, black as good soil, blacker than bull calves blocking the road where trucks idle, blacker than the oil belly of a thunderhead, unload wine-black the scouring…

  That’s what Jamie called them, when we met in prison and he spoke of love: “There was this great big woman,” he said— “big heart, trouble getting around, so…

  Now on this first warm day I wake alone. Leafy on my bed of sunlit sheets thinking of green and leaves like hands on my body. Your hands. The…

  George Burns, at 99, puffing on his cigar, confided to us That his doctor had warned him to stop smoking—then noted That his doctor had died many years ago.…

  the snow made a cave the snow made a cave erupt corrupt it opened before us      we tunneled through it closed behind us      no way…

  The year that she was three, my daughter was a fox for Halloween— orange felt hood with ears, a tail stitched to her back, and painted-on whiskers— the only…

  I say I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but of course I do. Like buttercups in a meadow, I think: paralyzed; because of course I am stuck in…

  From the house barely, nakedly, burningly driven into pasture beyond— bad daughter thrown across acres without even her mother’s shawls and pillows. Where to sleep where hopping things won’t…

  My corner. My alma mater. Your street. This endangered fish. Even when we are patronizing we say Sure, honey like of course poetry matters. Polo, quilting, Côtes du Rhône.…

  Ice Glen, a side trip on our trip to see old friends. Our plan—a hike, and then there was the thought of Hawthorne and Melville, a century before, and…

  This is how heaven was invented. You know how you can’t remember where you were before you were here? It’s like that. How you point to a picture and…