Here is my first offering, love: The first time I flew over the Citadelle (The clouds above it shifting to bare its vast self: Fortress meant to keep the…

  Saint Augustine preached humility & the need to simply be on the ground. Do you wish to rise? he asked. What would he say of these words then, which,…

  —Charlottesville, VA   I am sitting in a station built in the Depression, an island in a scrap drive sea. Now they’ve converted, serve fire-roasted vegetables, plates of bread.…

  In the beginning was nothing, nothing orthodox, nothing unorthodox. Only the pure point of utterness out of which are all things disposed. Still—from the mountain-top you could see all…

  Santa Fe, 2018   walked down that street past our casita the place we’d stayed our bedroom window past the Cathedral the Christmas music our last Christmas the deep…

  What is there— other than the bear hold—held up in cold nights as example, other than the body of bears, waiting in caves— the opposite of caving in. Nakedness…

  for Gloria Emerson We were sitting on the back porch when the news came on the radio: Saddam’s tanks racing across the desert into Kuwait. “That’s it,” she said,…

  For a long time I wanted to drink a cup of winter, to become tipsy on early dark & longer starshine. The thinning light my favorite ether. These days…

  We could use some new memories to replace permanent shadows left by people when that next morning the sun rose in Japan as if nothing untoward was happening down…

  There’s nothing more now but vacant bodies, the equations of being buried. I turn around: everyone is up to their shoulders in sand, they strain to turn their heads,…

  I had this ridiculous pang of nostalgia for Italian bureaucracy so I got a cheap flight to Genoa and then a taxi to the Municipal Hall in Corso Torino…