The first time we ever quarreled
You were cutting an onion
In the kitchen of our rented cottage.

The burnt-red fox darts in front
of the car's path late at night,
and I'd like to call this an encounter,

Whatever prince commissioned this fancy faucet
was sick of Luther and Melanchthon and austere Calvin,
the relentless pressure of salvation-by-faith-not-works,

Airborne it's like a dream. It's dreamy. It's for
all the world like something
ants have made, something gigantic fomented

Because this is Florida, we can be what we choose to be,
say, Dixie-fried Cubano rednecks. It's that kind of place.
When the heavy-metal band plays "Rocky Top, Tennessee"

A storm of buzzards is circling outside the window
of my hospital room, looking south and east across the river
toward the high-rise construction cranes downtown.
They are a regular sight in December, buzzards migrating
in particulate vortices, slow-moving gyres that resemble,
from a distance, glassless, black-feathered snow globes.
Satin-hemmed sheaths of cloud shuttle across the sky,
diffuse silver light alternating with bursts of Florida sun,
the occasional spatter of raindrops from a string
of unseasonable storms parading up from the Gulf,
cars composing a stop-and-go stream of metal
parallel to the river, small Caribbean freighters docked
along quaysides of cabbage palms and crab traps,
I can see it all with great clarity, the birds, the traffic,
it’s effortless—the doctor in the eye clinic
spoke enviously of my vision, better than 20/20,
even at my rapidly advancing middle age.

Five o’clock on a crisp, star-clear winter evening,
sun just sunk beneath the oyster-blue Pacific Ocean,
a panoramic swath of reflective foil rippling incessantly
as if ants were crawling everywhere across it.

Abras, augers, arks and angel wings,

bubbles, bittium,
baby's ears,

I’m the original two-hearted brawler.
I gnaw the scrawny heads from prawns,
pummel those mute translucent crustaceans,

On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, but driving past you would hardly notice it, a boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and