"Last week I lived like a child:
lime room, then purple room
in the afternoon. A custard for lunch"

"My mother drops exhausted on the coverlet of a king
sized hotel bed on the outskirts of Pisa and promises to
never set foot in another art museum for as long as her life
allows."

"Plane landing. I know this unrolling sprawl. Young woman in a plastic chair. Blue box at the edge of the ocean."

"My parents, Ohio River Valley natives, bought three
acres of wooded land surrounded by soybean fields
and carved a house out of the branches, a giant brick"

"I am a bearer of dead things
the catheter hangs
around my neck"

"This is the type of grit meant to be trapped under glass,
buildings with soft crown molding just starting
to curdle at the edges, cheese in hot sun"

"fingers hair woven
pull upon the tanned nape
for you to"

"there is no harsher lesson
it is the whip
cracking in the air"

"Heart blossoms splendidly till wind blows out
hope and the mobile’s light blue lullabies
tucks love to sleep in warm Byzantium."

"Walt,

we do not love the same, you and I,
as you showed me with honey and birch beer."

"A balloon stretched thin
sings depth on a whim"

"A Sunday evening, we were coming home,
My orange Spanish book matched the trees,
It smelled of leather carseats and October sky,
The temperature fell overnight."

"from the crow's feet that had landed on the runways of your eyes,
something about Ohio veins on legs
reconciled with straightjacket maps."

"She wouldn’t look at me.     You know that—THAT
left a mark. If she did—she was like           this      alley cat
watching me through a fence
waiting"

"Wolves exist, wolves with wide yellow eyes, exist;
wild wolves, and winter, and windows
wild-eyed wolves staring me down"

"A man of few characters

his tongue relaxed in admiration when his eyes glanced off

                          the swell of the Pearl Tower

                                                    the swerve of the World Financial Center"