if you rub the back of your child
at bedtime
his wife will be happy

I can’t but for doing,
I guess, put my eye
against crossing

1.     At first, I thought I was an angel.
I was alone & the black air
hummed with moths with the smell

On the cover of the book of 19th-century
etchings, three lady bicyclists, 
their black eyes fixed on the front wheels,

unprecious, as song to howl,
as captain to warlord, as wolf
to man, as the wolf in the man

At the left, the ax; at the right, the saw.
The ax in the block, the saw on the sawhorse.
Sawdust smothers the walk. Sitting in the

The delicate foot of 
Phoebe Isolde Farmer 
taps measures acceptable to, among others, the 

Jack Crack
took his palette to Paris
and writing his friends

Don’t worry, Patricia, 
about being forgotten: 
you have left stray hairs 

Somewhere on a manicured street / a poem is waiting