The Delaware’s a greenish black river here, flanked by other, slower rivers—fields of snow, rows of leafless sycamores larger than God, two shoulderless snaking roads. I’m in the truck…

              After Simonides, frag. 543   Who locked us, child, inside this cunning chest, left to the stirring sea, the night-lit deep? Should I…

  The nurses pass like wisps of blue cloth brandishing syringes of colorful liquids. They say this is for pain or this is for vermillion or this is for dragon.…

              —after Kiki Dimoula   The goat was bleating so much its voice had grown hoarse. Furious, I opened the oven door: “Knock it…

  Gaze down these pink tunnels into deeper pink. The walls are blossoms fashioned of smaller blossoms attached to raised arms that nuzzle other arms. It’s like watching a parade…

  Still alive, the pond freezes and melts, can’t decide.   It remembers the stream that fills it underground.    Caught in a circle of hewn stone, it shivers.  …

             Village of Chokan, 8th Century A.D.   If he returns after drinking his black wine I-don’t-know-where. . . . His armor, piled against the…

  empty page of a day and I’m fixed as a prisoner in haunted city walls where the bartender keeps book a flock of blue sails huddle together against the…

  Pale blue arms folded like a bow across her heart, you were born into silence, the umbilical frayed like your loose connection to life. The priest and his water…

  Measuring out two fingers, I pour it into a heavy glass, weight all in the base. The murmur of it shining —I sip down. Late, I’ve looked out many…

  Easier than writing in air, but not impossible. A woman at the Chinese temple grieved for her lost son. She wrote the story on the landing of a wide…

  And this is where they found him in the snow. At first we thought a hunter’s shot a deer. My husband’s gun. My garden does not grow. A prescient…