A round white troll with a black, greasy
heart shuddered and hummed “Diogenes,
Diogenes,” while it sloshed the wash.

During the screened-porch dinner of corn on the cob,
pork chops, tomatoes like red meat, warm and bleeding,
I felt the first stirring. The air moved, cracked the damp

Ask the sand crabs for an inch by inch
description of my hips:
they’ve been scaling the depression I left

When the man can’t sleep, he builds
a matchstick replica of Auschwitz
in his basement, working from memory.

I turned forty the year I wrote it
  all down, every bit
  I could remember:

Sluice me, stop my breath—still my 
  life to this, my fist 
taut, a hand of fingers feeds my 

Karen made a poem
walking to rehearsal
about children making angels

Several people from Chelsea, seminarians and clergy,

in the wand of the Oxford Movement transported to America,
made their way out to the Territory, out to Wisconsin,

There is so much lonliness in that gold.
The moon of every night is not the moon
That the first Adam saw.

I might have been a martyr. Instead I was
A scourge of martyrs, trying souls in fire.
To save my own soul, I tried tears and prayer,