In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll’s body. Sickness begins here:…

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing. I have whirled the midwife’s extractor, I have my honey, Six jars of it, Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,…

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing. Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings. Knowing…

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, plunges headlong into that black pond where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind…

Widow. The word consumes itself — Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire Levitating a numb minute in the updraft Over the scalding, red topography That will put her…

The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in, Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth. October’s the month for storage. Thie shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach: Old tools, handles…

This is not what I meant: Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows, Bald eyes or petrified eggs, Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets, Lard-pale, sipping the thin Air…

Whiteness being what I remember About Sam: whiteness and the great run He gave me. I’ve gone nowhere since but Going’s been tame deviation. White, Not of heraldic stallions: off-white…

There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air Stilled, silvered as water in a glass Nothing is big or far. The small shrew chitters from its wilderness Of grassheads and…

I can taste the tin of the sky — the real tin thing. Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. All night…