Out of the imagination.
Out of the brooding brain.
Out of the urban nest, lined in desires scaveng'd from

It's a wave, isn't it? Not a particle,
A fresh, cool wave so why am I flushed
and not washed?
Why dirtier than before?

The good life is unbuttoned, questions
about gender just stirring after a raucous night
under the hammock. Rumor has it that trellises

The skin is the largest organ in the body. The skin of an average-
sized man has an area of approximately seventeen square feet and
weighs about five pounds. —medical handbook

Setting: crooked Brooklyn—rendered beautiful by a night
of rough, wind-driven snow needled across building faces,
sticking where stucco has worn away over years—fragments
of exposed brick—hard edges of a first, forgotten surface.

Does she feel safe there, between her dad's
big knees She stands upright or half sits,
red dress always the same, white underpants

There the sun was, dying in the abyss,
in a haze of shadow, no sign of resurgence,
cooled, and cooling, slowly, dismally

I stand before this landscape at dusk
   jacklighted, caught in the high beams,
shocked into stillness, rapt, incapable

To talk about the weather is not just passing time
but an occupation in a city where weather
dictates streams of confused syntax like snow

Among the things that we don't know
about their civilization is the name by which

they called a clay plate such as this, that is