Thunder blooms unevenly in unknowable places,
breaking distances into startling new chambers

She dallies now in plots
but feels a longing for dispersal

Loss of names is a kind of leakage
but there is another: the actual scale

are such an orderly race

Egon Schiele knew that he was two people

I know two lovers who could not see each other correctly.
They kissed a lot but what they saw was not really the
other person. It was a person each one had made up.

At the end of my feeding-tube, I didn’t realize
that to stay anywhere on the earth’s surface is to bleed:

The population kept changing downstairs: single women,
unmarried mothers, whole families of petty criminals…

I picked up just enough politics to frighten my mother,
and the slick, witless phrases I used about girls
were a mixture of my father’s and those I remembered

I could only guess that the blade leapt out
to protect them, like a strong father his family.