When he leaves, you see a black pig
in the hallway vanishing, returning

The customer, he wants only
the liver, the size of a lover’s earlobe

Everywhere I walk, he is cat fur,
orange peel beneath my tongue: a tincture
of needles, the taste of liver salving

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—