till mirrors can see your body—& insects crawl like lips in between blood & sentence, i shall think of the window nowhere but in you all over —nothing is…

  The June air thread- bare with rain.   Cloud cover, the un- quilted cotton batting.   My eyes stitch this (brick-red,   beech-green, sea- pearl-sky) design be-   cause…

  One quake after another was triggered by complimentary chardonnay on an Alaska Airways flight out of Burbank   And by clouds nerved and sheathed, clouds dark and branching  …

  This year’s quake was centered in the body seven years ago replaced by the body now   “Some facts generate their own metaphors, and the news is surreal,” said…

  This epoch’s quake was centered in “no man’s land,” sounding suddenly strange   And striking us maybe more so as “no woman’s land,’’ said a seismologist and single mom…

  Before I’m even out of the car I know he ate her, the Holstein. With her yellow-green behind, yellow-green nose. I’d renamed her—DoeNee: short for this poem’s title. My…

  It seemed easy for us to throw away our toy horses and the nicked building blocks, to realize that teasing wasn’t the best way to go about things, that…

  Three snowy days this town is rich in icicles. If you couldn’t care you were never a kid. How do you prefer your glint and glare? Secondhand, pan to…

  I hear the waves slapping higher on the planks. Are you awake? I hear a fire leaning on the door. Someone should check on him. He’s only turning in…

  Because the final piece ended with the organ turned off but the keys still pressed down,   there was a rush of air, as if the whole church exhaled,…

(Johnson City, Tennessee)   What a ruckus—those fricatives inside that truck, spitting out roadside muck digging itself in deeper.   Overhead the sky’s one eye looks down. Near full it…

  To keep out the sand I built a house to uncover   each night its black name I built   poems I sang to keep small things   small…