In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
I’m coming! Don’t move!
Once again it is April.

“Up, down, good, bad,” said
the man with the tubes
up his nose, " there’s lots
of variety…
However, notions

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow
pressing from a clear bowl. All da
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep

Images leap with him from branch t
brighten, his head cocks, he pause
alert.
And when I see him I want to hide
The other wood is past the hill.

At the edge of the city the picker
vomits and dies. The river
with its white hair staggers to th
My life lay crumpled like a smashe
Windows barred, ivy, square stone.

“At pet stores in Detroit, you ca
frozen rats
for seventy-five cents apiece, to
your pet boa constrictor”
back home in Grosse Pointe,

Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft
If one of you found a gap in a sto
the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks,
mothers and daughters, old grandfa
cousins and aunts, small bleating

When I walk in my house I see pic
bought long ago, framed and hangin
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Hen
that I’ve cherished and stared at
yet my eyes keep returning to the

If he and she do not know each oth
they will not meet again; if he av
if she has grown insensible skin u
only the tribute of another’s cry;
as revenge on old lovers or famili

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod o
when a grandfather dies.