Let the wind whip a canvas with coffee grounds and leaves, the easel upright on a porch with boards missing like molars. Give the wind time and pigment: the…

  this one     and this one on a ferry a toddler in my lap whose? someone headless holding a live lobster aloft when? my daughter laughing at Pea Soup…

  If my nerves were sturdier, If I could let your apocalypse talk roll off my back, if my favorite nightcap were plunging over a cliff and being pulled back,…

  I cringe to recall the blue morpho’s pop Zen garden where mistakenly I stomped a butterfly golden koi kept vigil with the speckled flames of their bodies every summer…

  In this city of crows and rose-ringed parakeets, elephants and camels labor down the beach, marionettes tell stories in knotted banyan trees. Old monkeys with young men, men-monkeys in…

  I am musing for amusements, looking for something good. Ancestral spirits back me up. I am searching, and they are heaven-sent. What is beautiful? It lasts an instant. I…

  I drive by first, observing the posted speeds as though I'm looking to live at the end of the street or, season and time of day permitting, I’m hunting…

  Looped on the branch, ominous is the goose’s long neck aglow in morning sunlight, black feathers glossy and sleeked down, beak tapered into the air: a jetty. I do…

  Do you still look and see that it is good? You spoke, then saw what you’d wrought. We are the monster in the mirror, God, your world made of…

  In your dream of what never happened a boy turns away from your grief, and each month’s empty womb tolls a compline to spring. Once you knew time as…

  A faint glint reflected off the steel beneath the paint, then, like connected stars, like a graved fate, a pattern of scratched lines, scored letters, scarred words— I hate…

  If the gullet of a brown man is pink, he must be born of salt. Before hanging, his back must be strict as leather pleated by a cherry knife—blue…