When I caught sight of them, the secret lovers,
I had been watching the pink-edged white blossoms
  in the garden below

On a morning otherwise sunless,
Strolling arm in arm
Past some gallows-shaped trees

There’ll be nothing but infinite space.
The silence supreme, the silence almighty.
Bright sky. Many stars.

Philosophers practicing their scissor-clips
In the dark,
So everything comes out

An old dog afraid of his own shadow
In some southern town…
The story told to me by a woman going blind

It’s raining, it’s pouring,
And your heart is sad,
But you’re not about to say it.

Here is the wide veranda striped in sunshine
and here, beside the house, those bushes heavy
with tiny white clustered berries said

You died on Wednesday. On Friday
I’m hauled by limousine to be photographed
for a magazine feature, Charles Street

“I feel like such a… shit.
I rescued this little lost terrier
on Broadway and 90th, mangy little thing

“After you croak what’s to be done with what’s left?”
  you asked. And this, considering the disorderliness
of life, is by no means an unreasonable question;