He begins by troubling your
thoughts, the egg white you drop
into a glass makes the shape of a

I have held the man in my mouth
all day, trying to find a place
to bury him, dig him up later.

A sentence is hard for a sudden         to spin into space.

See the hand perch on to fish out on the limb so to speak?

It’s not to place but the verge of,

after Pamela Argentieri’s “Continued Persistence”
O arm that spurts flowers,
Branch giving birth to water.
O tree that bows down

In life
if I could say for sure

what I have loved
there would be

no tunnel needed

This bed is all hay and honey, 
fragrant with semen; 
yet it put a crimp in Anita’s spine. 

For all I can do,A last barn, dark as a plug of chewing tobacco,Crumbles into chipmunk holes. Then

While I wrote, a butterfly, that critic, rode my wrist.

The time of year when all my blood is thick,
This is the season when my heart must die.

Shortly before the noon is always high—

In the environs of the funeral home 
The smell of death was absent. All I knew 
Were flowers rioting and odors blown