Everyone else slept and we
were skinny-dipping in my mother’s pool
when the moon rose and birds

impossible to pick it up. the oily outer coating catches on the kitchen
counter and begs to grow, even where there’s no soil, the ones I did
manage to plant lived for three years—never trees, but the flat leaves

Purple puts on the squeeze.
Purple is tart and narrow.
Tyrant purple goes straight for the heart,

We are a nice family.

My sister Brindille, the first-born, used to be married. She had an hourglass which indicated the time when the water of the ocean would reach a secret point on the hill. 

Fifteen or twenty more dollars a night,
They could enact this solemn start
On the Grand Canal, if just in a garret

But having braked all the way to the floor of the valley
it dawned on us the slope we’d have to climb
and it was night, you on the back of my bike

We trusted no one so he came
along that first dinner and felt
or inferred the pile under footfalls

There’s nothing on earth like an accident
to put you in touch with time⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠—time then speaks
in all but words, your mother tongue, it croons

These girls riding bareback on their palominos down the slopes
what do they know, I thought

Montaigne was right, without the body’s meddling love
is more thrilling.
Yet from the start in elementary what she did