My best idea so far had been
to take a girl to a half-built house
and feel up her breasts, but bras back then

There are days I can understand
why you would want to board
broad back of some ship

I am learning how to sleep
                  again, to love
the descent, or is it,

lying here, a rising up
                  to summit
where sleep wanders

I am not a flower.
I am a chunk of meat
sprayed by the department-store cosmetic technicians,

The point is that love & love alone
holds up my feet as they step from
Bourbon to Rampart Street

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,

Soon you’re going thirty miles per hour
through slush and they’re hardly moving,
barefoot but they’re catching up.

They come in many sizes—small and faint, loud and 
thunderous. And it’s a problem, what to do with them,
they won’t rise up to heaven where ears have the power

It’s a strange place
                 to try & find
God—inside

Memory brings us back to such a place—
the rows of photinia, each leaf a red flame
(blood-tinged, almost) violent in sunlight,