The first time I saw it, I thought what an ugly specimen. It looked like Grandma’s bathing cap, grown green and small after all these years. I sliced it open and tasted the pale flesh. And gradually she offered herself up leaf by leaf. In her depths she held a tiny, faded star, a spark that fell in the meteor shower over Frank’s garden. 

It's true. I lied. Isn't that how
we stay alive? Dr. Metz in Old Testament
101 said Moses parted the reeds on a lake,

After you’ve become a human drum
to let high frequency thrumming
create magnetic pictures of your
brain, you examine the evidence,

Bathing, Miss Del Greco informed us in health class,
is very important, especially once you become a teenager.
In fact I can smell many of you this very day,

The book rotted by the rain, the clay that’s slipped,
the earth screeches, plates collapse,
the walls lose their grip on the paintings,
nothing is aligned like the planets we think we understand.
Within the shock announced this morning by the howling dogs

Pindar says the poet must guard the apples of the Muses
like a dragon, but I grew up among Christians,
I pierced my dragon side by scraping off the scales
the way I clean fish in the sink.
A barely saintly gesture, but surgical.
You need gloves, scissors,
and a lot of running water.
And listening to its splash I start to meditate.

Writing with swiftness concerning the movement of water,
of startled fishes, the lavender sea-fan, the lobster,
you have omitted the arch of sand and the rigmarole

The soldiers were in the habit of saying that a dying

soldier was “going west.” Are you going west on your

vacation? We turned west at Allentown and drove west-

Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine                    Must I recall          Our loves recall how then After each sorrow joy came back again

Our story is noble and tragic
As the face of a tyrant not fun not for everyone
No drama or magic