The summer I was born—was it yesterday?—God stopped thinking,   stopped moss from clinging to stones, threw his hands up, wouldn’t listen   to the hummingbirds, nor other animals…

  In the paintings of Tiepolo and Perugino — everyone speared through and through,   everyone suffering, the eyes of saints rolled back behind the lids.   Everyone wearing a…

  How marvelous, the way he looked and looked at all the as-yet-unnamed things. Even as the two nurses   rolled him back and forth under the heat lamps, wiping…

  i. May I sew you to a sheet…?   Long Saturdays in the waiting room— a shelf of chipped dishes and trucks, Little Golden Books, stacks of tattered magazines.…

  Drifting into being, yielding heart, lung, eyes, a fact herself in history   though omitting necessarily that sunrise in the brain wherein the vaguest self   follows a trail…

  Named for the golden stalks under which it sleeps like a ploughgirl dreaming,   or for the runners that stray or “straw” until they root like a new wife…

the coal region, PA   In front of the sinking Ukrainian Club, a fat old Veteran plays accordion—reedy, old world, before-the-cold-war, after-the-rapture tune. My cousin and I drive late night…

  Is it always the mothers who refuse to let go, tackle demons and ghosts in the phosphorescent foam, a relentless sea? Or can we blame the moon, its bloated…

  Curiosity compelled me to touch your doll’s eye, make it disappear, a dull plop inside her skull. Memory prevented me   from popping off her head to retrieve it.…

  Call the mole-catcher. He’s dead. Oh good. I mean good for the moles. The whole of this side of England is trembling. Veronica has a theory: They’re Dutch moles,…

  “All is lovely—all amiable—all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart”—Constable, on Claude Lorrain   So I’m wondering if we were all converted or ordained to…

  Because of you, I am dying. Like the rat our landlord is poisoning to make us feel more comfortable where we sleep at night, my days are numbered. I…