On the farm this had been the hour
Persimmon leaves rang like iron
Or the sound of a screendoor slamming

the only difference
now is that I’m an incurable romantic with an
incurable wound.

When I am 12,000 miles from her
she will take her head
and throw it off a cliff. 

Winsome Bob meets Katherine & drops Nancy.
Nancy burrows even deeper
into her studies of semiology, at Yale.

In the ninth grade I met a fantastic number of times
with Cookie Harris in the woods . . . Under the pretense
of going over our Algebra notes, given the pressure

Eddie, you said you forgot about insanity & death
when you were at the beach. ‘From Beer To Eternity’
was as serious as you could take it.

Tree

All the chemical deeds
Of a tall beech in the rain;

                The bishop named his turtle Tortuga.
An austere choice, but the bishop is austere:
he wears old stained trousers and lives in the dark

                So here I go in the famous Spanish slowness.
Clouds advance in their relentless armada—
(Thornton Wilder once said it takes a year 

                 A few months back, we went down to Huelva 
to clean our graveyard—condoms hung 
from the saplings shooting up from the dead: