Because the final piece ended with the organ turned off but the keys still pressed down,   there was a rush of air, as if the whole church exhaled,…

(Johnson City, Tennessee)   What a ruckus—those fricatives inside that truck, spitting out roadside muck digging itself in deeper.   Overhead the sky’s one eye looks down. Near full it…

  To keep out the sand I built a house to uncover   each night its black name I built   poems I sang to keep small things   small…

  This, the old month when we live inside listening to talk-radio or watching afternoon movies like children sick with the flu.   Tonight I danced a corpse road tapping…

  It is to be born into a fragile garden between today’s rain and my left brain   where the artist hangs like one of these colorful characters with nowhere…

  The snow carries the chill of Novocain, the dentist’s Latex fingers that taste of nothing. What Is the circumference of your absence? I play Jerry Butler And Otis Redding…

  Tonight the full moon slips like a coin into God’s own pinball machine.   Auden called it a “clockwork spectacle.” Perhaps he was wrong—just once.   And Victorian Meredith…

  Riding out to the Coney Island end of the line, with a view to look into the third-story world I read about, I stop at Smith-9th   to frame…

Eros   —lord how the loved infuriate, the cat’s fangs in my petting hand, the fern in the fernery grey & limp as old kelp & the woman re-writing all…

  The way boiling water lives in fire Is how a cactus lives in the window. And how a tree runs underground, And how the sun sets over houses.  …

  I have been ridiculous: crying in the street, holding frozen spoons against my eyes, as if they could cure. Months pass with only cloud cover. Tonight, grief lacks the…

—for PJW   So gentle a man, yet so fierce a passion for poetry! I’ve known him to argue   for five minutes together against a misplaced comma or another…