Who would have thought—too much simultaneity: 
The Swan Planters hovering above the windbeaten 
Statue of the Virgin Mary who casts her gaze down 

So strains of your argument bear
great darkness and then gleam,
and I do not lose the rhetoric of your approach.

You cannot see the writhing at its core.

There is a kind
of whiteness to the day,
everything pared down,

The addition of solitude untrammeled,
one and more and more but always
the inner life astray,

                                1
To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited
landscape as far from nature as you can get
without actually leaving the planet, a man-made

Dear Uncle Chris, welcome back to my mind
   after so many years. Forgive me for
         not thinking you up sooner: the coiled-vine

Once upon a time. A six-year-old boy almost might be raising himself
from the waters of sleep, onto a beach made glass as a wave’s sheet pulls taut.
His left arm props his torso, his legs (still sleeping?) trail behind like a seal’s

If they, more petite
   than the mice whose flittings
         have pillaged their robes’ sparkled trim,

The seven-story trees
on the jogger-thronged hill
beyond your back garden