He still wears the glass skin of c… Under his hands, the stones turn m… His eyes are knives. Who froze the ground to his feet? Who locked his mouth into an horiz…

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

What makes a poet? Many have tried to guess. Is it a voice like a conduit, a plainspokenness to grief,

Because my grandmother’s hours were apple cakes baking, & dust motes gathering, & linens yellowing & seams and hems

When I am an old lady the young men will come to me & sit trembling at my trembling

Chi vuol esser lieto, sia: di doman non c’e certezza. —Lorenzo di Medici In the poplars’ lengthening shadow… amid the rows of marigolds and ear…

The women he has had are all faces without eyes. He has entered them blind as a cut worm. He has swum their oceans

(a flip through BRIDE’s) The silver spoons were warbling their absurd musical names when, drawing back

These beautifully grown men. Thes… Look at them looking! They’re overdrawn on all accounts… & they’ve missed (for the hundredth time) the expre…

You gave me the child that seamed my belly & stitched up my life. You gave me: one book of love poem… five years of peace

The decorum of fire... —Pablo Neruda We learned the decorum of fire, the flame’s curious symmetry, the blue heat at the center of the…

You call me courageous, I who grew up gnawing on books, as some kids

You whom I hoped to reach by writ… you beyond the multicolored tangle of telephone wires, you with your white paper soul trampled in transit,

The cover of the book is astral violet, & within it are poems, most of them

You open to me a little, then grow afraid and close again, a small boy