These are the objects, the touchable—table, refrigerator, chair,
grease-splattered whiteness and woodgrain.
And here is the sound of the baby muttering and cooing,

Out of the imagination.
Out of the brooding brain.
Out of the urban nest, lined in desires scaveng'd from

Wherefore the cutworm, that consumeth not what he
   destroys,
that sunders below the leaf, that razes at the spindle,

Because silence is unguarded and truth
Has an odd way of putting his snout
In at times like this I teach the children

local knowledge is to live in a place
and know the place
however barren

1956: She is the girl with the biggest
breasts in Sloan, Iowa. She will take
a backseat to no one. He is young

the biggest bore in town
arrives at my party
as if he were invited

and begins to tell me
the details of what a terrible
time he had getting here

but it was worth it he says
and I know he will be
the last to leave

and Dear Little Mother do not think
only of yourself your suffering

On the morning that lasts forever
the neighbors are playing a tape of Tibetan
monks again, somewhere between groaning

at Delphi. Some judgment! Now I've got osteonecrosis,

talk about the dead speaking through us.
The fountainhead cut off the flow to the corpus,