Some say it’s pickled
(formaldehyde) in the basement
of a funeral parlor in Indiana.

No, we’ll not pack our bags yet. The hooves
you guys and I were hearing were just horses.

She asserts herself at the damnedest times—
when they’re working out at the gym, say,

There is a kind
of whiteness to the day,
everything pared down,

You cannot see the writhing at its core.

How lonely to be understood
And have to kill, how lovely.

Excuse me a minute.
The angel is black as a crow.

He has none, of course.

The thing to avoid is in that frame,
the reasoned screen fixing light
and shade in pithy squares of shape.

Last night with our minds still in cold April
in the late evening we watched the river