Remember this one? Narcissus vs. Pond in a staring contest? Wind riffles water, Narcissus declared winner. Enraged pond pulls out hidden revolver. I don’t remember it ending like that…

  Where one should hear the echo of a duck’s call there is only glazed stillness, the word lake so close to lacquer, lack. Stood at the scum-rimmed edge I…

  XI. In Navajo creation stories, the Coyote convinces the water monster     to inhale him. Our neighbor is surprised to learn that Eric, reared Jewish, identifies as Buddhist,…

  Unless while it’s growing you feed it strips of pork fat crushed with orange   rinds & ginger. Unless you turn the soil with your bare hands & blacken…

  The Golden Age Then the animals could talk in words. The sparrow to the farmer sang and the farmer sang along, the pine and the laurel counseled the honey…

  The old oak in the creek’s bend stands blotted black with songbirds— stripped branches’ lateral buds breaking early-sunset sky— we sounded like them, you and I, when you screeched…

  give me any lyre-like thing I’m on my knees what I’m on my knees * the swamp I move through careful your own drowning is at hand * presume…

  A scarlet breeze buoyed him next to us, his white feather hair a boy’s, giddy and bright for this, what he called, “the immaculate air.” It never crossed my…

  Let me learn to love this land, the lay of the highways, the maze of crooked one-ways cobbled together in colonial haste. Give me a place to linger, to…

  When I return to the dog, the first thing I see is the teeth. And then the dog disappears. But the teeth remain. Bared. Bereft of dog. The bared…

  Nights Daddy didn't come, our mother turned down the roast and set out crayons. My sister peeled the rind from a color called flesh. I chose periwinkle like his…

  Returning home from work, I found myself following a garbage truck as it lumbered south through rush hour traffic, as it maneuvered its rusty armed or elbowed front loader,…