You swing yourself
from hour
to hour.

Husbands
fill up
the whole world

The grass is full of codes.
The signs are everywhere:
used condom, apple core, a baby’s sock.

I’m at a double wake
in Springfield, for a childhood
friend and his father

See how the white turns pale blue as the night
creeps in, full of mosquitoes and fireflies.

Your image doesn’t dim; it
resonates through all my life.

Shy defiers of the existential world,
you draw your veil across the unpleasant,
then the head turns away, the body turns away,

What a life you’ve had! A face like a photo album,
a road map of good times. Its zigzagged lines
      resemble

there walked one Iraqi in a three-piece suit
who tried to express by his general indifference

Little excavators, postage stamps
of living stone, you seek to save me
from the encroaching dust—scratch it away,