She was here, no she was really here. She had taken her shoes off, sat down at the foot of your bed, hand on your peace-white hand, her picnic…

  This train stop at Liberty Airport used to be fields, now folks rush into the city, going home or away to a new beginning. I find myself checking for…

  There are days of no poems. Not even 17 sounds will come. Why is Joan Didion walking congo baby tiger in my dream? Frog in the pond. Scoop her…

  During life I wanted to be buried in a mystery. On a western estuary where seabirds nest. To drop into a piece of muck and shell, unnamed. Wind, low…

  Dwarf plants, brittle green, A premature llama, a white giraffe Splashed clean, a pouter pigeon With an inflatable crop. These are the limit of my estate. The first pouter…

  I hold my life with two hands. I walk with two legs. Two ears are enough to hear Bach with. Blinded in one eye, a person sees with the…

  Night, the street, the lamp, the drugstore, An empty and toothless light. Live another twenty years more— There’s no way out. No use to fight. You die; rebirth is…

  Standing here at the kitchen sink washing the breakfast dishes, I can see this favorite yellow coffee cup of mine, brought back from Italy ten years ago, will break…

  A saturated past his nod, that untaught, I’d known sacred slant and tilt, in silence, spoke a red blaze to the green man, unmoving and dark as a forest…

  Here is my first offering, love: The first time I flew over the Citadelle (The clouds above it shifting to bare its vast self: Fortress meant to keep the…

  Saint Augustine preached humility & the need to simply be on the ground. Do you wish to rise? he asked. What would he say of these words then, which,…

  —Charlottesville, VA   I am sitting in a station built in the Depression, an island in a scrap drive sea. Now they’ve converted, serve fire-roasted vegetables, plates of bread.…