1 In my dream an elderly man climbs through the window wearing     only boxers and a threadbare tank top. His hair is dripping and it     appears as though he swam a great distance. He opens …

Three green doors  in the falling apart shed. I put one on the stream  and wave as it leaves. Someone will knock  miles from here, and go under, and live in rooms  of water, take your boots off  …

Nothing lived on land, nothing had crawled out of the shallow sea. Because they have no hard parts, it’s rare to find the fossil of a jelly. The farm boy digging a new duck pond exposed thousands, …

      Well I’ve been afraid of changin’       cuz I’ve built my life around you                                      —Fleetwood Mac Today in the car I heard the …

In 1896—nearly fifty years after Melville’s masterpiece, three years before Freud’s  Dream and my grandpa’s journey across the Pacific— a storm shoved seven tons of white blob onto a St. …

Darwin could not believe an insect would visit a blossom that had no reward so insisted this orchid must withhold the nectar deep inside. But he was deceived as well. Which brings us up-to-date— …

  Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from  here !   When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here .                                   …

           Madonna and Saint Anne, Da Vinci It will not work. He’ll never fold back into you, body curled tight, a kitten in sleep. He leans— seems always to lean—away. Everything you do …

for R.P. We came wanting the ‘marvelous knowledge’ the blue evening eggs, radiant desirable as alphabets beginning and ending with the letter ‘A.’ The eggs. Prodigious. Round as the sphere of …

They say if you just strap weights around your ankles and wrists  and carry on                     you will be stronger. They say if you just strap weights to your earlobes and …

Before unlocking the door, Derek likes staring in the portal window for a long time, watching Jack watching Jill as they huddle in their chairs near the giant monitor. They wear shirts in …

As if what’s said here is not my heart’s wreck. As if turbulence did not author the need. As if this scribbling were not last council. As if this sheet would be found in the breach. As if you, …

Before words, there was the language of the mark. We moved a stick along the dirt and drew a line to the end. Our wild flickers  ink-streaked a page, symbols like the stars’  orphaned radiance …

There’s no one who could be everything for me. That’s what I tell you walking up Seventh, and I think it sounds good. The flea-market has just opened. You hold up a mirror for fifteen dollars, …

It’s the part of the film ( Charade ) after Audrey Hepburn has lumped ice cream on Cary Grant’s suit ( though she doesn’t offer to lick it off ) so he takes a shower fully dressed in  her …

Beside the copper bell and hammer,  a tea-brown gas mask stares out, left eye  cracked. A tangle of rope, blackened  and frayed, lies pressed under glass  like a lock of hair. What doesn't burn  …

I am thankful today for thumb and finger chafed raw from lifting you, each blood- dripped iridescent figure, between saws of teeth and under cheek, laying each in a lidded bucket atop twisted, …