OCCUPANT
The sad mailbox of my extreme youth, what did it ever deliver? The only...

A CRITIC
Pick up your socks. Clean the house once in a while. Go to the dentist. ...

HISTORIAN
Piles and piles of books, boxes of documents, photographs, bones, shreds of clothes...

YOU WHO KNOW
I was just enough bigger that I could wrestle you into the clean straw of the mow...

GRIFFY LAKE
I spread my smooth water like a lap and caught the trees' faces where they fell...

BUSRIDE

We are rolling. Snow and stubble
fields all around, vision bleaker
than I can tell. There is no
horizon, only leakage towards heaven
of vapors the earth becomes.
I haven't traveled this way
in years, not since I was broke
and twenty, but this kind of riding
stays the same and I can feel myself slipping
towards fourteen years ago
each time the blackbirds
step up from corn rows
into air. Pinions clatter, cold
pinches skin delicate as grass. They carry
their hunger with them in flight . . . 
Your face had the same oval
my lips make closing towards a vowel.
Its shape goes everywhere with me
thin as paper.