He’s festered with hives and celibate,

a sorry-ass anchorite holed up in a condo,

peevishly enduring the failings of his flesh.

At first, he blamed the pills he popped

Every day invisible bits of him break free,

fly off, and leave him simpler, more leaden

than the day before while he strains to make

the daily round, and flesh that used to hum

In this compact piedmont coal town, a hospital,

a walk-in wedding chapel, and a funeral home

are all within a half-mile radius of steep-grade roads,

and you can get on a bicycle outside the maternity ward,

He envied his dog her bone, the way she shook

and damn near shat while she sat, expectant,

waiting to clamp and tooth it in the weeds,

the way she cracked the shaft and fanged the fat,

When you doze into late afternoon,

propped and pillowed like an exhausted child,

baleful billows from open windows;

when you no longer walk with me by the river,

by sinews of ink and willows

After the opera Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas

Something’s very wrong

when a girl begins to sing—

loudly, lowly—

hauntingly dispersing posies

Click, click, click.

My husband picked them off

with his camera

as they were flying

across the sky to reach

sundown’s reddened roosts:

A night drive, somewhere on the coast.

There’s a ghost in the car, a noun waiting

not lost but far away, a plaything

or a thought stuck in my throat—

it takes so many bees to fill a hive.

Close-ups are impossible to swallow,

the details anatomical, subtext comical, some

cheap trick of a zoom button. Instead

let’s praise the big and fundamental: a wedge of soap,

a stone for the soup wilting away in the still-warm tub.

Where the river quiets, back turned

to the sun’s eyeing, father,

father, take back your baskets of bread.

I have left your long-laid table.

A thousand ships to get here,

I sent messengers to plead with you

across an ocean

I sent desire. When nothing returned

I sent the pale-handed

harbinger of war.

If X equals Y there is less than an island

between them. If X equals sky then there is

almost room for Y in the concave of X’s body.

If X is burned, Y is also burned. But curiously,

cooking for Antonio

Some give up their skins

easily, but you slipped

a gourd, glanced sideways

at the past, welled up like a gorge

I find you under the holly, become

a Christian sprig, I admit,

but then there is

a conversion of berries

into a kind lightning rod

that kid in the green asked me about

sandcastles

so i placed him in the morning

There was a death in the park and the men came running after it, their legs mysterious with speed, and

circling like weather they found him hard-packed on the dirt in the clearing near the fountain. His eyes

were utensils, strict and sharp. The men upset the dry ground clockwise, heads low in disguise.

I turned to the boy with the camera and asked him for his neck

but his neck was very busy and his blue hair was an advertisement

for rejection. So I kept on breathing his air like a desiccant

drawing the lines in, blowing up in a shrinking space. I was

Look at the grapefruit falling

apart he has none of his own

money and may never have been

in love the grapefruit rounding

the corner halved and unadorned

losing the train. Homebody.

Once when I was too young to know any god

damn thing about women I stood in the

alley with one Karen Mendez who

told me she was a nympho and who said she