These holiday mornings when nobody
gets up at the right time to do what they do
so there’s nothing out there if you’re the one

Nothing alive can keep us as we go.
The end loves all the doors that close away.
We may embody what we never know.

Sometimes love’s vagrancy (whatever you call it) 
overwhelms all but the most robust subscribers, 
and, dishonest as it may sound, the whole cramped enterprise 

It is hard not to look down from these heights
on the unfeeling flatlands
of southeast Hagerstown, its minor-league

have never known starvation nor plenitude
and unless the order of the world 
changes, I won’t. 

I want to wake her, run to greet her,
even if she were dead a hundred years
and showed herself as no more than a shadow

Month of the least death poetry, 
I pity you: a bone of a day 
once every four years tossed your way. 

A film of mist clings to the storm windows
as the thunder gets pocketed and carried away
in the rain’s dark overcoat. A good reading night—

First appear the tiniest islands, crumbs
brushed off the mainland, each
outlined in china white, as if by a child.

There in the shrine at Lourdes 
Embellished with old crutches, splints, and canes 
(Freely abandoned by the cured,