Where is paradise without the gate?
Ask any gardener, his bags of bonemeal busy
  keeping the weedy world at bay.
Within its boxwood walls, like that great kitchen

I thought I knew something
about loneliness, but I was wrong.
I'd never been that far east before,

I haven’t met you yet. I’m out the door,
late for a bus, suitcase spilling open,
disgorging my life so far.

We were too late to catch the moon,
already hauled from the swamp
and hung up to dry. Moon melon,

Because the painter knew that history,
when it happened, happened in Venice,
it's on the steps of the Riva

Some pets, Horace says, spend their lives
going over the same old ground: some suburb
      of love. A parking lot

To the canyon that came so close
to touching me, I was nothing.
What good was a truck gearing down

        Swept Valley

Which sounds like something the wind
        would do:        

The woman is preparing her body for sleep.
She hangs the hair forward
and it almost touches her feet.

As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry.
On the stone back of the Ludovici throne, Venus