Pastures where the grass round granite grows
and not immoderate greenness gives homage
to the long fight with clutched rock & snowcap

When they were big, they knew they must leave the barnyard
and make their way in the world:
the first little pig took her toothbrush and her mother's

Try to see graphite boil. Try
to imagine a hand, in a press,
in a cellar in Buenos Aires,

I wonder if phlogiston theorists
were lovers, if it began when they
were set off, like the brown grass

The end of autumn
unfolds in a series of textures and places:
rough towels, the laundry

Heavy, and now grizzled (pro tem) and generally high colored.
The voice light, tripping over itself, setting off at an angle
into the thickets of vocabulary. It’s gone; let it go.

The population kept changing downstairs: single women,
unmarried mothers, whole families of petty criminals…

Acacias. Acacias and rain make May here, the way
lindens and rain make July. Layers of complication and sorrow, 
which precipitate as opinion. Brusque. Off-kilter. Uncalled-for.

At the end of my feeding-tube, I didn’t realize
that to stay anywhere on the earth’s surface is to bleed:

Who else understood? Your edgy, defeated laugh?
The modest, unhopeful evangelism of your final appeal