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…

    Green shutters—white house.   Paper whites in the weak western light.   Brown mouse and its brown hush   across the stairs, four daughters   brushing long brown…

  I’ve given up many things to the elements: that floor-length red leather trench, my father’s violin. When the storm rolls in, it’s hard to quiet the crew   in…

  As if the extinct thylacine opened its jaws 180 degrees like a book and swallowed Father clean. Those striped haunches glowing in the forest—see   the beast zigzagging with…

  Mrs. Sparrow, your one staring eye is blind to the sky. Flattened like a book, you have an attentive fly,   burnished green and gold, decay’s sleek courtier, who…

  Someone left a water bottle on a tiny gravestone.   I’m at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston.   I came to see the tomb of Increase and Cotton.…