“Someone/who loses himself for the damp word of promise/where smoke rolls upward from a Pall Mall.”

“I stalk a weakening current, a mirror/to wandering, tracing faint verse/into sediment just/below whitewater.”

“At the time of the heist, the lemur was thirty-two years old.”

“You can’t tell / if the snow is fresh, a god-sent snow, falling / or if it’s just wind-lifted, old snow come again”

“Carter gazes at a thousand shadow treasures / he’ll loot to catalog in haughty solitude / until the war, until his cancer comes.”

“It began with him following me. Then, I decided to follow him instead. Street after street. Bridge after bridge.”

“Eight hours in, the fights begin to break out.”

“I watched moving clouds/soften the sky with holiness/then pass their pure hands over me,/blessing me and healing /the sadness of my young life”

“It hangs on me, in me, ornament. Reflecting thing, all things in the room absorbed.”

“Everyone’s mind rushed to give meaning to the box: it was a bomb, most likely, that an audience member had slipped onto the stage during the dark, and it was up to Patti, as leader of Psycho Femmes, to deal with it.”

“My clients are wealthy—that goes without saying—but that’s all they have in common, so I must acrobat my way through each conversation, with not a moment’s hesitation as we leap and roll.”

“Disrupting the dream, a holy terror: an alarm clock rings and I’m jolted back to the taupe world,/back to my day job, where, wholly unencumbered by spiritual dignity, I work myself to death.”

“Every garden graveyards in a season. Take Eden.”

“There was a truce between you and him/when the unbidden noon hurried in”

“Between the river/And the remains/I watch as my wife and son/Do the grave chores,/Remove the recidivist,/weeds pressing their suit/Around the marble”

“I light one, and toss it under the slide.”