Not the turmoil, the togas, the color TVs in the Forum—
he gawked at them with the eyes of a bumpkin,
but he smiled at them too. The tree.

Rooting in brittle mortar—
gypsum plaster, sand, and water—
bougainvillea grew around the arches,

Remembering Nabokov

 A dark damp night and a sudden hatch
of moths has covered the glass of the

The dew drops from the white magnolia tree, same as the last year.
She will stand by the window, calmer than in winter.
Caught by the scent of spring, she will bring stolen branches

The clock inside the mantid
       egg under the drifted snow,
  the sap clock in the February tree,

It was about seven or eight years ago.
It was between the portly three-storey white house
and the faded red shed behind the lettuce patch.

We’ve come to expect earthquakes, fires, hurricanes,
and tidal waves from our whitecoated brothers
whose laboratories shed radiation

The best way to eliminate guilt
Is to have nothing to feel guilty about.
Thus spake my surrogate father

Dying of thirst,
I long to share the fate of the wild irises
Each raindrop must seem to whom the size of a boulder

First the choughs
in a band of three:
red beaks lit