Dear Mom, it’s been so long. Since back when / I was a loggerhead shrike, back when I followed / my breath—I the Desire—I’m dry outside / to the nostril, or from it, every / which way. Lip to …

fogged each a distinct cataract blue / beads drape my daughter’s neck when I pull it / down from the shelf the jewel box / smells of very old woman what remains / of great grandmother’s chest …

Or is it border-patrol duty dawn to dusk / This morning they began like a water-glass choir / Multiplied by ten in the birches along the river / Until a robin on the back lawn shoved another off / A …

A path is carved where nearly sprinting springing forth Turkish slippers or relay doves Venezianella healed emerges from the gondola cabin in crimson flecks and enters St. Mark’s like the essential …

Single tenant / of his emptied city, / coat blown open, / he carries a bucket / of quicklime / to the coast. / The birds make / their derisive whistles, / watching from the woods. / On a sun-bleached …

I wait to come to good. I wait carved from the same war, wait draped by the mechanism between myself and fabric pleasure, how pressed, how shut. The icon I remember is ragged and full of brown …

I am unstrung: ash in an ash-garden. So say an instrument, tuned in clay, strung with ash. Not a music. A means towards an end which picks each ash-strand from the body, the mind’s camber. So say …

I have a fever and its name is God. / The nurses come in shifts / and worship it. / All around me the land suffers from the loss of love’s handkerchief. / Children sing brackish rhymes / in the …

the ides of July those fifty years ago, when / my grandmother split wide, unbroken, unnamed / light pouring out of her: a river into a river. / Svet: luminescence, shine. The child took a while / to …

Let’s consider for a minute how time is built / in this green mechanical bird how slippery / as bullets the whirr of its tiny metallic brain / its tinny taloned wings its tinseled / wind-up heart …

When the culture passed over: / we bathed in its light in its fear in its / mountain stream. We left mountains / of carts full of junk behind. We bade them / farewell. They bade us weep / and know …

This is no oasis of peace, / Mantegna’s dead Christ, the body / foreshortened, the head enlarged, more like a wounded / dwarf’s, the focus / on the shrouded genitals: behold the man. The ribcage …

what began as salt, / as blood and need, blue and / winged and laced / with spools of astral milk, / what began a sweet ache, / thunder of swifts, / the softly closed eyes of the air, / vertebrae, a …

they speak of deep resentment / of abandonment / of internal bleeding / they say that everything was a bolt of fire / that god took off running / a shawl thrown over his head / the sea was peeling...

On all the happy mornings, when the trees get covered in oranges, in lilies of fire, between November and December, and in school during the exam festivities, and Mother arranges the honeycombs...

Over the frozen air over the horizon where the morning is / rising and it’s only the infinite whiteness of Antarctica / dawning just like a giant dead planet over the frozen cities / over the …

So I had two lists of names for a girl, so / what. The president’s allowed to / have two speeches, in case the hostage / comes home in a bag. The geese / in the metropark don’t want / for bread …

Black animals fill the face, silhouettes, buildings fill the face, an alphabet fills the face. Inside the face, black animals grow, they animate the data, form a demography of day, stained and soiled …

Tonight I moved between three beds  like I was sailing on the Mekong  and whispered the beauty of the Tigris and Euphrates  under an endless moment  looking  under the left tit  I have a hole  …

when fire rises to the tongue your words were the rain / your servant efendim was the ash / when the secret lies in the open your lies linger / efendim on your servant’s tongue