All night rooting, Hamlet squeezed loose,
a secret pinkness under the wall,
your pet piglet

If a man steals his neighbor’s shoes, he must
guard them day and night. He must not sleep.
He must try and eat them.

A tongue crossing the place where we burn
our trash, the snail slides over
ashes, nails and glass, moving

The companion Enkidu is clay. Sharp March dawn
at my study window, at my view of twenty-seven
budless lakefront elms. By May the water vanishes,

They wanted rehab-at least a month from her,
not just the writhing days it took for detox.

& anyway by this time it was all a kind of joke:

Cold starts with the sun gone down
warming up at early dawn

Overcast at break of day

It must be cold in the ground these winter mornings.
            The man who delivers the paper drives
            up our hill each dawn, and the news arrives

  Imagine our nation is a giant boy,
down on his knees in a giant kitchen—
trucks and trains and stupendous armies
marching across the mop-clean floor.

What false color, a fickle color, whatever color will do.
Point us at a sunset,
and we are golden. Open us to the world, and we are blue.

The thing to avoid is in that frame,
the reasoned screen fixing light
and shade in pithy squares of shape.