Begin with rain: swollen weight of it, tender ache of it, strange drain into fluffy-white days, off-the-sheep’s-back days, sweet-as-spring sky then blue, blue, blue as if she isn’t there, though she’s everywhere, double-quick, electric, slowing to gray days, storm-round-the-corner days, moody, broody build-up to release, relief, rain.

    People walk the market in stilts. To either side, the peppers in cages struggle to carry a burn. You always now ask a day to be made simple, to sit outside flung on the grass. For a year you’ve been waiting for autumn’s lessons to come

    because in uncertain cases the participle verb acts alone      because wintertime       an inflated sense of fluency              because pairs of things always have so much meaning        our tea bags slumped in the sink bleeding twin scowls     2 persimmons perusing the bowl because tender gifts give opposite advice       a loaned book smelling like a damn book      what …

  A quick cut—a smooth parting. Shorn fruit slipping from its pithy skin. Not much in the way of satiation but a vision of orchards fills my stomach. A cardinal starts its song— through my window, moonlight is still pushing its diaphanous body through a canopy of wilting oaks, fighting hard against coming storms of …

    On the front, a rainy scene – daylight cascading through a red patio umbrella, damp chair cushions, drips from the overflowing gutters. Almost pastoral. Drizzle dimples the birdbath water. White undersides of leaves, innocent bellies, flash while tree trunks arch, stretching, growing. Like teenagers, restless within their changing bodies. A motorcycle’s red flash, …

      C’mon, muster the pluck, though the quills are slow to give. If you tug   each plume just right, just so, the pinch will sting less pink. Think   how relieved you’ll be to see your frowsty feathers on the floor, dull   as orphanage laundry. Look, the bristles lie listless, slack …

    John Huston’s The Dead (1987) after James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914) I don’t really need Richard Ellmann, that master sleuth of every trace Joyce left behind in Ireland, in Zurich, in Trieste. I don’t need to learn of Nora’s experience in the West with her own Michael Fury. Among the golds and browns, …