You are washing dishes on a Friday night. You are beyond the lives you could have led. You are only some of what you used to be. You scratch away and handle. You stare in the cleanliness of clean …

The moon in the house is Room 237 / Room No. 42 / On 2/21 when my dreams became real / The moon smashed into the light / I spread my life like cards in front of me / If I die and …

The coroner is piecing together the tale of the pair in his possession. / As if their corpses are jigsaw puzzles laid out on a wooden table...

1. Every essay on (the impossible of) translation resembles every other, but this one is happy in its own way. Like a striptease that leads only to more clothing, let's begin with a contradiction: …

I'm thinking here of the proto-Indo-European root / which means the precise sound of a flower bud / unwrapping, and the tiny racket a seed makes / cracking open in the dark, which has evolved / in a …

The train's familiar whistle and the foghorn's high bass note under it   make a chord as I drive along the river, my windows down   under a low, cut on the bias moon as it moves like a slug   …

They scuttle, exoskeleton-like, on the path ahead. / Like a glove my gloved hand / fits to your ungloved hand, our major / to minor keys, and all the pines / and all the pianos in the woods / hold …

Everywhere we step / we step into the ejaculate / of the sun. Splurge / of daisies, spree of plums. / I am not ungrateful / for what I have not been given. / I do not begrudge / the rolling hills / …

The day the starling flock tumbles twists whirls through / dusk their scissor beaks clattering like rattled bones / the day they rain down deafening and feathered as if / smoke knows knives as if …

By evening, everything changes to/a startling non-color. A clock chimes/in the hallway. I sit down at me desk/and try to write the letter to my brother./Then he dies.

Caravaggio too knew/that violence and murder underlie religion, eroticism, all/civilization.