In the Realm of the Five Senses what does desire attach to?

The wildness of the heart increases in the dark.

The absence of God only makes it wilder.

We lie in bed wearing bird suits. We sing.

your paperweight. This seems

wrong. Seems like a sign that I need

to spend more time on my own, so I

Tor House and Hawk Tower

on Aaron’s mother’s den floor

and the boys can’t figure how

My Dad has come to pick up his black bag that carries a small, permitted firearm. I’ve put it up high in the closet next to the two Christmas dolls I’ve already purchased for my daughter.

Searchlight greets the audience like a hot yellow hand: love and law
partners, Catholic girls in mustard uniform, their chaperones curling
Playbills to binoculars. When illumination finds a politician in your section

When I emerged, it was dusk & I learned that this too is hell,

an afterlife, the center of a lost amphitheater whose seats

are a deep moss, wet-black with yesterday’s rain. As I faced west,

the sun, obscured by the pines, shone in the gaps, pulsed

Whenever it appears to the [appropriate government] that land in any

locality is needed for any public purpose [or for a company]...

Thereupon it shall be lawful...to enter upon...any land in such locality;

to dig or bore into the sub-soil; to do all other acts necessary to

If the highest goal
is do no harm,

what a wonder we’re

Dear woman, we both have had our fill of trials.

The Odyssey, 23.394 (trans. Robert Fagles)

I only thought it, but you turned to me

Ekphrasis after photograph bearing caption “The body of Big Foot, a chief of the

Miniconjou Sioux, lies frozen in the snow that covered the bloody battlefield at
Wounded Knee on September 29, 1890”

You catalog by hand, playing librarian in your dead

mother’s house. Try to justify archiving each item:

A balanced checkbook. Mothballs. Life Savers

mints. Back copies of the New York Times.

Merriam-Webster online now tells you

the popularity of a word. “Bole” is in

the “bottom 30%.” How would that make

you feel, to know that you as a noun are

There was air before there was prison before there were brothers

in prison calling collect through miles of wires to say, I live.

I am your ghost in the cellar

of America. I keep your nose on my face.

We carried twenty-eight days of pills in small plastic dials. We

carried the dates of our last periods. We carried lipsticks and

pressed powder compacts. We carried self-defense-kitty key chains

like darling brass knuckles. Sometimes we carried keys to