To get proper grapes you’ve got to
breathe on them some,
fog ’em up, thin the skins.

Seen that sign, back west a ways?
The one on the warehouse, in a movie marquee?
Blessed Hope, it says. Blessed Hope, she said.

The Hyperboreans—“people beyond the North Wind” —
according to Diodorus Siculus, inhabited an island
from which the moon “appears to be but a little

Here is a piece of required reading 
at the end of our century
the end of a millenium that began with the crusades

On this small island that undoes us daily,gently,
It’s hard to take too seriously, too intently
A town whose name means town

Drones out brittle, weary invocations, the certainty
                                      of fruit now distant as the first word
On God’s tongue. Such disarray. So much leaf-rot,

It was foolish planning to arrive at noon 
But, in retrospect, it doesn’t really matter. 
There was a bar, after all, where we bought water 

Once in the sweet dark of an empty house,
All alone while the others slept upstairs,
I knelt before a memorial candle

The Wish Department

Today I sight-read the last 
Schubert sonata: he wanders between keys: evasive

Another cow was floating by us,
hilariously calm, bell-deep 
in milkweed and tansy. She looked