Contents

ONE

  1. What’s in these books that have come to me
  2. A mile outside of Yellowstone
  3. What is silence for
  4. Rage: after the funeral
  5. Our bare brief jeweled guitar
  6. You might have to
  7. What my mother loves is solitaire
  8. Light chores between first and second sleep
  9. Ice recoils tonight from marshes
  10. Meanwhile I am preparing
  11. Some parts of speech are harder to draw
  12. One time I fell down got cut

TWO

  1. At times I want to walk off the set of my body break my name and burn it
  2. Midnight radio from Astoria plays funk
  3. Let me try this clumsy again at dawn
  4. The historical marker is a form of guilt
  5. The condo held the rock star’s body like a puppet
  6. I haven’t ruined my body yet with joy
  7. Whatever I have been doing all my life I am doing now
  8. I’ll try to stop singing
  9. When word comes the emperor of the world has died
  10. No longer a kid I have come to the grave
  11. You were beside me at the start of this
  12. On river road the moon suspends

THREE

  1. When I land and get in the taxi
  2. Outside my apartment
  3. Affixed to upper balconies of the World Bank
  4. I’m in Washington and
  5. Like a die that is only real every sixth throw
  6. Grizzled countenance of morning
  7. I am a child of ghosts
  8. His grin’s upside-down police cruiser
  9. Each friendly encounter is a basement
  10. I write her name on every napkin
  11. Money is a bandage where above the oak

FOUR

  1. My mother is a ferocity on the Hilton Hotel roof
  2. By now the hospital has unfolded
  3. I am an event in my sudden willed loner’s mute drama
  4. Last light of summer glints off the motorcade
  5. The stoned guy from the first floor
  6. How we tear the billboard down is how we tear the house down
  7. John Donne was dean of St. Paul’s
  8. I hear that people are dying in America with the very
  9. It is the reverse of everything
  10. A dying man is almost grown
  11. After the matinee I feel acutely
  12. My name’s in the forest

FIVE

  1. From inside the secondhand store I admire
  2. In the industrial kitchen I take red debris from the dish
  3. In salmon silence of nineteen
  4. Cottonwoods parse their shadows along the river
  5. The grill is wrapped tight against the autumn sprinkler
  6. Above the canal tonight by the willow overhang
  7. These on the other hand are orderly
  8. The old man we pick up in Browning
  9. It was my blanket first and she took it
  10. A train runs late through my arms
  11. Ospreys nest their rising dollars upright
  12. At the western outfitters the clerk