Sometimes the poem doesn’t want to come; it hides from the poet like a playful cat who has run

I am the Sphinx. I am the woman buried in sand up to her chin. I am waiting for an archaeologist to unearth me,

Parachuting down through clouds shaped like whales & sharks, dolphins & penguins, pelicans & gulls,

I sit at my desk alone as I did on many Sunday afternoons when you came back to me, your arms aching for me,

If it is impossible to promise absolute fidelity, this is because we learn so much geography from the shifting of one body

Dearest man-in-the-moon, ever since our lunch of cheese & moonjuice on the far side of the sun, I have walked the craters of New…

Little egg, little nub, full complement of fingers, toes, little rose blooming

I love to go to sleep, When bed takes me like a lover wrapping my limbs in cool linen, soothing the fretfulness

I sit at home at my desk alone as I used to do on many sunday afternoons when you came back to me,

Meathooks, notebooks, the whole city sky palely flaming & spectral bombs hitting that patch of river I see from my eastern window.

She leaps into the alien heart of the passerby, the drunk, the girl who spouts Freudian talk over Szechuan food. She is part herself,

Ash falls on the roof of my house. I have cursed you enough in the lines of my poems & between them,

People who live by the sea understand eternity. They copy the curves of the waves, their hearts beat with the tides, & the saltiness of their blood

The old poet with his face full of lines, with iambs jumping in his hair lik… with all the revisions of his body unsaying him,

On a darkening planet speeding toward our death, we pierce a rosy cloud & hit clean air,