my neighbors
say, when what they mean
        are deer—the foragers, the few at a time, fair

The trees, the ones
she loves,
                  are desperate—

Black coffee for Amanda,
sipping the white steam—Jessica says
                 we have to

What makes Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
so hard to put down is his wild branching rhetoric.
It’s not enough to trace pathologies of mind, whatever

Such pleasure one needs to make for oneself—.
She has snipped the paltry forsythia
to force the bloom, has cut each stem on the

The man is ripping through the brambles. He is
lost, tangled. He seems beside himself with grief.

Creatures of many hungers say we’re near.