My black-lettered Hebrew Bible, dense 
and doughty as a cobble. The Bible in Hebrew—irreducible!
Yet at the first verse, a hair-thin net of cracks
appears, each crack a vast highway, and wildly we leap 

Arachne laughed. “You wartier than a toad
old crone, what do you know of artwork, ragged
hag, calling me too beautiful and bold

The world is white, twig tracked by wrens,
supposed color of innocence,
swanned with snow on hedge and fence.

Now we are going mad not saying goodbye 
in elmed Milwaukee evening, everyone here—
Aunt May and Margaret, and Tom John’s limpid eye

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 meteorite is somehow connected to salvation
from the destroying father: the celestial child
emerging hot out of the earth.

The secret fetus curls inside. It is not
understood why the snail
embryo twists back

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: