I enter a room where a fan seems to be chanting
“Air! Air! Air!” as it whirrs. I see it’s not
the fan, after all, but a child facing the wall

It's exciting—in its lower case way. No, it pleases me enormously, to go out in the morning and see that two or three tomatoes have started turning orange-red, to see the reddened ones a little darker, a softness taking hold day by day.

    Would you start being twenty-eight in you thighs, your toes, your head?
    Would twenty-eight begin in your belly-button?

My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.

started from unpretentious beginnings
and hasn't, in fact, come very far along—
still occupies the back wall of the bedroom,

I used to believe that nobody was really crazy.
That people were all basically good. Sometimes it was
A question of coaxing them, a little, but in the end

You are the secret conscience of the age.
Your power is confirmed
in the milkman's punctuality.

Its intentions are clear as the air in a bee hive
It is not a surrogate for a kind of absence.
It declares itself like a finger. Cicero

It begins simply with nail scissors, clipping, the ends of a few hairs from the edge of his beard. Finally, after a week, he begins to notice that his beard isn’t growing.

In my younger and more existential days, the most innocuous of phrases—the ubiquitous “how are you,” for example—would cause rockets of nausea to crash in my belly. There was a time, to be sure, when I could answer “fine” with the best of them. Daily vomiting rapidly cured me of that.