“Alas,” he thinks, “a perfect day for a walk.”
But first he steps outside to take a look.

no thank you I don’t want to spend my life
giving extreme unction to a crowd of toads

At the party: they surround him and his chair.

“So it was in the morning, then,
that you first put this hat on your knees?”

Resist. Resist: 
Dehind, dehist.
Return the clear glass to the kitchen forthwith.

No island is a man
lonely on all four sides
with the door left unknocked

Where I went to college in the purple valley of northwest Massachusetts, there was a fellow in my class who used to drag a brick around by a string. He called it his “pet brick.”

Eurydice’s Hairpin. Cassandra’s Curse.

There are the names of wildflowers
that come out just at night,

Each night the dairyman her husband
sinks like a hoof
in the muck of his sleeping,

I have always considered it bad policy to land on my head. I try my best to avoid doing so. The head is just not structured to bear the weight of the body, or to withstand more than an occasional semi-violent thump. The soles of the feet, on the other hand, manage this quite well. I have jumped from a few moving vehicles in my day, and let me tell you, the head is just a frightened onlooker in such instances.

One fine morning in a bright green garden, an old man sat crying. His beard wound round him like a friendly serpent. The big sky was so blue, and the little birds singing. The smiling sun cast warm nets over him, as the gentle breeze did blow. The old man looked up. His eyes were so red from crying. I want! I want! he cried in his old broken voice.