You must get drunk. That’s it: your sole imperative. To immunize yourself from the backbreaking, body-bending burdens of time, you must get drunk and stay that way.

After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a silver two-franc piece he inspected closely. I wondered about this odd distribution of coins.

West of Laramie, Elk Mt. snow covered top—Medicine Bow Mts. ranged black—that Road still ribbons past red sandstone buttes—“Looks like you shd be a yogi on each rock”—down the vast green valley floor

    Like Utah, like America, mountain rookeries cliffed distant under cloud-fished transparent sky—the Blue Shield, that might be heaven over the Ferris Mountains’ precipices (illustration) striped under snow dusty pine ridges.
    Great Divide Basin up Rt. 287 grey mud lake at Muddy Gap—Rock wall leaned up from colossal ditch, smooth stone sheet cracked by brush upsprung—Rattlesnake Range rocks bunched up in mountain piles north blue sky’d—Dry wood snowfences snaked straight up hill south of the highway, wood slats x’d together.

A window for seeing
A window for hearing
A window like a well
that ends deep in the heart of the earth
and opens out into this expanse of recurring blue kindness
A window that overfills the tiny hands of loneliness
with its nightly gift: the perfume of generous stars
And from there one could invite the sun
to the geraniums in exile
One window is enough for me

O my seventh year, the year I turned seven
O wondrous moment of departure
After you everything that happened happened in a mass of craziness and
    insanity

i have gathered my losses
into a spray of pain;
my parents, my brother,
my husband, my innocence
all clustered together
durable as daisies.

today i mourn my coat.
my old potato.
my yellow mother.
my horse with buttons.
my rind.
today she split her skin
like a snake,
refusing to excuse my back
for being big
for being old
for reaching toward other
cuffs and sleeves.

The dry, black branches of winter seen in flight
run singing. Come here to drink
translucent drops on fresh leaves.
Come over here, and try to light that wick.

And suddenly in the street on parade
the exhausted elephants
and monkeys, biggest of buffoons, dwarfs
falsely cheerful, the trapeze artist
who made me want to weep,

Sudden September thunderstorm
then long wearisome rains;
still on the beach the fresh
rush of waves;