Not in the goodbye so much itself as in the greeting Of goodbye, the real letting go, as you say (hello) Rests not in the heat of the moment:…

  I was surprised the mattress shop sold deathbeds, I hadn’t thought of it as a niche, but when I lay down upon it— Swan’s down, classical ticking, wire coiled…

You drank in the King of Prussia most nights, aging just as you’d intended—surreptitiously, with wrinkles in your lungs. And you still wore that red ribbon round your neck— kittenish,…

  When it hurled itself against the spinning wheel of a car we hid our eyes, but the crippled pigeon lived and alighted at the curb’s gray foot, looking up.…

(La Gitana, Louis Kronberg)         Not the gardenia-painted comb    in the crown of her slick black hair nor the curves of her shawl, its rosebuds swirling, like…

  When I telephone my erstwhile inamorata she speaks in the voice of minestrone. Not the minestrone her mother would make having stood the entire morning in a small windowless…

  The day’s rind grated down to bitter pith you order what the menu calls a seasoned mix of tubes and tentacles. It arrives sheened with something like what condenses…

  I am in the room of my marriage, when I had one. Like a memory of a dead long gone ancestor, Everything is polished with a certain conceit. As…

  Three tickets left, she pulls herself into the monster truck, rearing on hind wheels, buckles herself into the driver’s seat, stiff-arms the wheel. No one snaps her picture, one…

  He sensed his ear, but he could not see it. In the blind this is called blindsight. The last failed effort of the body to survive— Keep this object…

  Detached from everything but the fluorescent flatlands where bitchy angels rule the morphine drip and gauge the numbers in broken verticals like a child’s rain— I was stroking her…

  South Natick, Massachusetts   Before they could scrape, prime, caulk, patch the divots and deep cracks and repair the ubiquitous rot, three men in t-shirts and torn jeans covered…