There’s no looking back. Looking back has been removed as an option. [...]

My mother sits befuddled at her telephone, uncertain who she means to [...]

Among the dead in a stranger’s plowed field, I stand alone with [...]

all the armor plates cannot protect you, eremite the way you burrow [...]

It is January. It rises up out of the ice and puts [...]

There’s a picture draped behind each face. Huge black light posters, in [...]

The birders lie dressed in their beds, gravely waiting. Soon, they will [...]

Llamas dot the hills. White rugs on a green rug. You never [...]

In the Yard today, the pine needles began snowing down. The way [...]

Color of J.C. Penney’s jewelry, trinket in a Cracker Jack box, color [...]

I don’t trust you if you haven’t gone to Folsom when the [...]

The maple leaves are as big as my face. If I was [...]

After the Vision Fire, November 1995 You kicked at the campfire, went [...]

Black knife, black wish, the thing comes over the canyon wall a [...]

They show no signs of finding the food, though I’ve left it [...]

In 1887 the Army Benevolent Fund decided to charge rent to veterans [...]

Of course you invited them in: faces painted like trick-or-treaters, carrying pointy [...]

In the past, I’m told, men pushed their heavy furnishings to the [...]

The barbed wire fence stripped the boy’s body like an apple peeler [...]

We could have lived anywhere, strung light and power around a tree. [...]

The sidewalk split open to reveal the dirt underneath it, the sky [...]

— A film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992 Excerpts from Marguerite Duras The [...]

No entry, no door, no clean line around the drifts that twist [...]

Mother willed me a box of ashes from her burnt house. Maybe [...]

In the Hotel Devotion there is no running water, no power, no [...]

Her mind, in its dying, grows into a version of who she [...]

the only place left to shave is inside your ears you are [...]

The article said it helps to look for one thing, as a [...]

Coma of ice and dust, sublimated Accidental star of Bethlehem, your Streaked [...]

The twilight smells like moths. Moths and libraries and children’s breath preserved [...]

This from those who drove out to see the others drive their [...]

Together, twenty and I keep the kingdom in our midst at bay [...]

A seraph flings the window wide and the walls, like two moth [...]

My father’s body has become a crippled shrine, a complex-compound formula misfiring. [...]

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is [...]

I half expected to find your name, Dad, the obit telling, like [...]

I dreamt that a plane crash burned your body, that the ocean [...]

First a spark, then flames of floral consensus. We’re a patch on [...]

Fallen from focus, streetlamps turn to faint plots. Anything we ever said [...]

More people are killed by falling coconuts than by sharks. Creationists tell [...]

For the 141 in the Triangle Waist Shirt Factory, Union Square, 1911 [...]

“We have seen that the members of the same class, independently of [...]

Her hair shining in afternoon light, a lower register in a voice [...]

In various suites the newlyweds carom and — slapdash — suck, hum, [...]

Nothing else in the swamp rises beyond the surprise of you and [...]

Come, love, undress me anyway, let your fingers fly to my ruddy [...]

Again the old heart returns with its old heat, that old alertness [...]

What of the altar’s fire, burnt through flesh, now licking the bone? [...]

As a sycamore on 104th makes plastic bags fettered to limbs into [...]

They strung up the clowns Because it was already a circus. Because [...]

Already what I knew to be true is all tenses: has changed, [...]

The main plotlines are never important. As in Shakespeare, it’s merely the [...]

A lost voice gets in the cereal box, eats the oats. Six [...]

There, just in front of the jetty, a boy had drowned after [...]

Who could help it — chalked hop-scotch on the sidewalk, don’t we [...]

Stop the car. There. Now breathe with me. That broken Ford needs [...]

Our napkins have sailed lap to lip, lie stained with the same [...]

And she will slap me & slam out of this story. Another [...]

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There go the dead leaves, there go the sticks. She is rushing, [...]

As the story goes, the raven’s wings aren’t black. They’re waves, capping [...]

Suppose I’ll go then to the hardware store where they still hang [...]

— for Nathan McClain Another day in the cloak and dagger biz, [...]

All gospels spell it out the same way. In the beginning, there [...]

What do you do during communion? Sit on your hands. Count each [...]

— Flatey, Iceland Remember that twisty gravel two-track that crunched under our [...]

Last night I dreamed you lost as an old shoe lying, strings [...]

Let’s undress & let our bodies float above us. The moon is [...]

I. The wind throws bones before she rises: the boiled, the worried, [...]

The stores ran out of butter every day. So you ran out, [...]

Already the panic has begun. The questions: Who will crash? What will [...]

I know spring by the hawk pinning down songbirds in my neighbor’s [...]

We examine the ratios of spheres: Pluto an atom next to the [...]

To move is to experience pain. To turn the head, impossible. The [...]

— for Hart Crane’s mother To coax out your spirit I left [...]

I’m thinking of living forever. I think that way I might finally [...]

Had you been able to see your mother when she was young [...]

— for my father In this city whose name you can’t pronounce [...]

Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what [...]

No longer can I just climb through—the time Is past for going [...]

Fog this morning. Thick. And loving the thick bodies of live oaks, [...]

My father’s heart is a little red car he parks in the [...]

“… she sent spectres, ruled the ghosts, and carried into effect the [...]

Giant salamanders, blue-black and purple-black, lie along the bottom of this stream [...]

— for Ernie Mulford I was told you were buried on the [...]

They hump like grunts in a long line down out of the [...]

You start in the garden. I start in the fruit. In the [...]

for Celine Dion I tell you about the little heart that beats [...]

Is this how the gods see us? Lusty, tangle- Maned mustangs shifting [...]

Sometimes at breakfast a face or two: a magazine I took from [...]

A small man is surrounded by only great, expansive land — forever [...]

Wednesday’s garbage. Swearing off the good stuff. Watching early-birds rile a mist [...]

infest the arbor: three neat shafts evenly spaced in the last rafter. [...]

yr bread. We can be prison food, happily. And if hungry is [...]

Maybe it was enough to believe the Zodiac’s blazing entirety would be [...]

with a line borrowed from Nellie Sachs If I could, I would [...]

Halogen bleaches night’s black fabric, whitewashes the dust. Redeyes jet the milk [...]

Red would want to walk along Fisherman’s Wharf and recall the first [...]

I keep a note a friend left in a book of photos: [...]

This flatness is a sickness. But this sickness can be cured with [...]

Call yourself crazy, but these swallows in the eaves speak of arriving, [...]

The first step: picture a field. Panting heaps of grass. Clouds: thumb [...]

“The voice is more than the body’s excursus, its way of going [...]

We heard the fish there cursive through the coral, That starfish prowl [...]

Though the mechanics have picketed, the flights go off as planned. What [...]

The steam, a too-early, wet-haired winter morning. They had shot off the [...]

thank god they see me. the water is getting in at private [...]

An inmate at the Winnebago County Jail escaped for a number of [...]

Because we’re looking for the Seven Sisters, that’s why we’re here, embedded [...]

The buzz comes from the baseline and the rubble border to the [...]

i. Because old novels are always furnished — red velvet and larkspur. [...]

Now a certain young man followed Him, having a linen cloth thrown [...]

Something happened in here that I can’t quite write about A front [...]

The farmer, husband to my French teacher and friend to my mother, [...]

When we were children we wanted to be orphans. The snow came [...]

Asleep on the roof when rain comes, water collects in the dips [...]

I was working the knots out from a yard of my wife’s [...]

Our father and I are down on our knees side by side, [...]

Like guillotines, every lesson from childhood taught me about precision and punishment. [...]

I can’t help but see the first few crocuses that will somehow [...]

After raping Philomela, Tereus “seized her tongue with tongs and, with his [...]

My Grandpa Evo had a special fork whose tines bent out wide [...]

Now we begin to introduce Mr. James Montgomery of Newton, Mass., to [...]

He’d been a tourist in churches, there for a look at the [...]

Here comes the finch out of the mine. Well, almost. In the [...]

In rain, the smell of pine and old cement returns to me, [...]

I used to love dirt. I’d dig first, then bury — candy [...]

That for a winter’s share of months — which felt then to [...]

— for Jess It’s too easy to be the ancient Chinese poet [...]

You swim to the next cove, the only act of leaving you [...]

— a Chorus of Old Folk We have a mind for expert [...]

In my dream about death, I come upon a hill, silhouetted, and [...]

As surely as architects fall in love with angles and lines I [...]

I have taken up residence in the bear’s black body; the bear’s [...]

how can i tell you what i have to if you can’t [...]

Past houses, past pickers and bone-cleaners, rats and carrion birds, alley cats [...]

Better days are the ones misspent as this where instead of what [...]

I don’t believe in beauty: my lover beside me beautiful: my father [...]

— after Robert Bly I felt the roof of my head break [...]

— In Memory of LMG This rapt, bandit-eyed mother, scorpion-diner and foe [...]

To pick that glint-edged glamour, lacquered body, lustrous odalisque, strung flower. Imagine [...]

After the burial, when we broke down the estate into child’s portions, [...]

We spliced genes from different species to create the ultimate killer. I’m [...]

I promise him bitterness, salt, the tastes of all my dead, gold [...]

— Wenatchee National Forest Our bodies are lower than the nettles. Our [...]

turned up like an artifact of our early days, the time one [...]

It’s been ten years since I first read those ancient books. Ten [...]

It wakes him up — the glow of his shirt hanging in [...]

All night the willow sweeps, but the creek never runs any cleaner: [...]

After I’m got, I never want to get. They hit the buzzer, [...]

This is not your death. From under a plastic surgical cap you [...]

I took my place among the men and lessoned to their conversation [...]

All those who can have turned their windows dark. Nobody wants to [...]

Say Volvo, say gearshift and straddle, say we rubbed to plums our [...]

My skin crinkles like cellophane. It disintegrates in the sun. There is [...]

Famed musician Jelly Roll Morton got his start playing the piano in [...]

Though there’s no boat the rain waits among the waves the way [...]

Little pig. You hug the ground, wide nostrils chasing down some phantom [...]

While playing tennis, I never think of death. Instead, I notice the [...]

After, we sprawl. Our arms looped, my foot against your calf, your [...]

Often I wonder what happened to lost buttons as well as husbands. [...]

Sit. You’re making too much noise. Bad boy. Think about it: what’s [...]

Standing in this current, trying to thread a 4X tippet through the [...]

A set of twins is born a sort of pun, By wit [...]

— after the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell Cherry blossoms [...]

Mother he is A gentleman of honor he is A builder of [...]

A woman’s face in the wood-grain — in the dust — of [...]

Not that the dead care what day we remember, if we touch [...]

Like ushers, telephone-wire crows convene slowly. Night’s a book of hours into [...]

The question is, of course, how could one not Think of Romeo [...]

So many automobiles. It must be Friday night. These are the golden [...]

If enough of us could land among the rest. If this reflected [...]

You joined me, last night, in the bargaining bed, in the deep [...]

It must be a day in winter in the painting where the [...]

In the morning I will teach you once again to play a [...]

Say sepulcher and then we will make love — our body’s balance [...]

When I wanted you bird, you bared. Unzipped and high, you grasped [...]

Another house fire. Another ruined suit. Another pile of ash. Another day [...]

1. You came to put up with the buxom peonies Helga kept [...]

My eyes read my eyelids when I dream the long straight ache [...]