Your glasses are strafed with sun.
The gravel above where your shoulders touch
detracts from the curve of your wife’s neck.

How can stone shoulder such scant curiosity, the flesh unpolished
compared to the other, more famous examples of suffering?
Not this one—the sculptor himself cut short of time—

In the pass, fishtailing around corners, in the whiteout
of maybe and two-way traffic, I said yes

Yes, the zucchinis grow heavy and wicked,
and yes, a porcupine parses the orchard
one rummy apple at a time.

The woman sits before a glass of wine
as if a talisman or offering
to the genius of the place.

There is a tree falling in our back lot,
a willow, gigantic and scarred, with torn limbs
hanging at oblique angles, its base a tangle

An issue of water from under earth
surrenders itself to light in cold arcs,
those things which by being are to emerge.

That they come to us lit by light and shadowed with shade
sent not to earth, but through it—
that they travel poorly from their time into ours—

Jewel Avenue, Astoria and no other. No, no, traffic makes me this way Van Wyck Van Wyck. Why don’t you switch? Which kind of battery? Motorola? The brown one? The tiny one? The flat one? If you remember, you spend fifty dollars for nothing. Hello? Every day in a kind of golden mitt, but it turned out to be just another head cover. My dear Jewel

Then the old paragon rose and spoke: “Until this week we had the luxury of playing with language. Now, everything is suddenly the same. We must use words, my compañeros, to construct towering forms, juggernauts of play. We must dismantle the family—you know which one—using these edifices. Only then will our children’s earnings and our