Two guitars were left in a room all alone
They sat on different corners of the parlor
In this solitude they started talking to each other
My strings are tight and full of tears
The man who plays me has no heart
I have seen...

It was like climbing a mountain to those of us who’d climbed one. To the others, it was like, I suppose, something else. In other words, we let everybody find her own figure of speech.

Not that it—speech—lay thick on the...

The heart, the surgeon says, does not reveal
the small rifts, the hairline cracks which

split the hairline cracks they conceal cops
and robbers in a stretch of skin flaunting

star-scars with show of blood bone
the ledges of what it holds tight in checkmate

moves:...

We gathered in a field southwest of town,
several hundred hauling coolers
and folding chairs along a gravel road
dry in August, two ruts of soft dust
that soaked into our clothes
and rose in plumes behind us.

By noon we could discern their massive coils
emerging...

This disease has come back
With frills and furbelows.

You must give your whole life to poetry
Only a few survive if that—

Poems I mean, paper crumpled
Shades of another water—

Far springs are what you long for,
Listening for the slow drip of chemicals

Through a...