Such pleasure one needs to make for oneself—.
She has snipped the paltry forsythia
to force the bloom, has cut each stem on the

my neighbors 
say, when what they mean 

What makes Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
so hard to put down is his wild branching rhetoric.
It’s not enough to trace pathologies of mind, whatever

Not smoke but the shades of smoke, and not cloud-work
but the gray and smoke-green densities of clouds—
if he were sure their voices would carry through

Thirty drops in a warm tumbler of lemonade
flood, for now, a cavern the Speedwell ripped open.
Three nights his dreams glisten with constellations.

Lemnos, you harbor me, moon-mountained
   and reticent, motionless in flux.
Dusk festers too long in the distance,

Though the rest of us remains closed, tired,
we go on hoping for what we know,
the essence of it enclosed in a dream—

April 2020

When I came to—crocuses were pushing up
purple in my garden, return of the cooing dove—

and when I got out at Penn Station there were no faces
along the tracks—

wind blew through 32nd Street with a faint whiff of onions
and hair spray

The part
that flusters some, that flusters no one.

In the midst of winter, where moonlight carves
stillness into the shape of hills, there is
a cabin feeding smoke to the low-hanging sky,