He takes night as a kind of medicine,
swallowing it with a buck and shiver.
Sometimes a drowning muse come from within

The fish circle the seas a thousand times
a day, never diverging from the endless
path of blue opening up before them. 

The house is humming with many lives today.
Too drowsy even for a slice of apple
or her own glass of wine, she prepares

As far as mental anguish goes,
the old painters were no fools.
They understood how the mind,

"Isn't it time I slipped my leash?"
         she thought.         For him, what was it?
A quickening. A corner he hadn't turned.

Another feast day, and the bells are ringing.
The bells are ringing, and not more
than a handful of versts from here,

Through leaded windowpanes the light pours down
less on the holy figures than on objects
waiting to be used that tell the story:

One thing I think everyone is nostalgic for, though perhaps without being able to articulate it, is a time when literature would begin a little less abruptly, without a lot of facts about cracker-named people before you’re told who they are or why they’re there, like so many dog-wagging tails or a pair of narrating lips set chronicling by one who imagined that a tone of

The first Tuesday in this warm November
brushes Long Island in a last caress
before winter repels our communities

We stood in the midst
   of a great alluvial plain
         and felt the horizon coming