We decided to stop drinking and spend Sunday at the zoo. It was going nicely until she worked herself up over the observation that it was a horrible thing to cage the animals.

You laugh when I tell you, but it is truth.
Countless physicians have affirmed it, according
to their various specialties. The oral surgeon,

Theresa used to come over every day. I’d be standing by the kitchen window and hear her cowboy boots on the walk. Then she would stand outside the door—I knew—listening for a sound inside, scratching the door with a twig, or reaching up to the handle to pull on it, softly, so no one would hear. 

The bullet has almost entered the brain:
I can feel it sprint down the gunbarrel
rolling each bevel around like a hoop

Everything I love is young. I love you, because you are young. Satire, Epistle, the glistening inner wing of a redwing blackbird’s wing, you too are young.

I am dying young. Horace, young lover of old words, young new faces, I love you best.

Riding in the wake
of your electric shock,
I was your therapy.

The sun has pulled
the dew from the grass,
leaving the roots warm, humid, soft.

He is no one I really know.
The sun-charred, gaunt young man
By the highway’s edge in Kansas
Thirty-odd years ago.

Guest night. Breath-taking games and—spending. 
I play hand-rubbing host, you guest condescending.

I am convinced of my true behavior —
How my impulse at certain times unfolds
like a hand limping over a rail road track;