You will not remember my face, said the Angel, in the imperium of woe, but there are some compensations to be had by the eye:   the cities in…

  I always keep averting my eyes from who I am. I don’t know whether this is true Of everyone I know sitting beside me At dinner at a restaurant…

  Flower baskets drool petals and the teenage girl in her pink and black skull pajamas walks beneath the flowers without hurry.   Parts of the morning are still in…

  Ms. Pearl’s son turned on her Christmas lights so no one would know she’s not there— a row of electric candles in the window flicker blue, gold, blue again.…

  The water element she builds in the back yard resembles a sarcophagus.   A terrier owned by a neighborhood widower falls in and drowns.   A frog lives in…

  I watched the film slumped unaware of watching our own film that was also made of skin and light, like before when the glass particles that shattered in midsummer…

  The whole sky is hunched. An intransitive thirst.   Talking a foreign language is like wearing borrowed clothes.   Helga confuses the words for land and landscape (who would…

  Three body bags of crumpled plastic and extension cords trail like entrails spilling beside the doublewide of Art and Esther who plot our holiday into full (af)frontal curbside pageant,…

  My processor is stuck. I need tea. I want a human on the other end of the phone, not some asphalt envelope voice that says I’m a vegetable.  …

  I might have been born to write your elegy. The moment I lift my pen your soft knock will be heard at the door. For fifty years or more…

        (1)       The Wyndham Sisters       John Singer Sargent, 1899   Cream-colored, both the plush brocade-covered couch       where two…

  The pounding begins / like the old war drums / in my ears. I can   hear your heart / as you watch me / from outside my exhibit:…