Can it be that there are a hundred gradients
of gray? that water and the residue of the sun
transform the red of brick storefronts to gray-red,
the green of the ash trees to a wash of ash?
...
As her life became simpler,
skeletal, like a stripped-down car,
she began to crave minutiae—
the pollen on the flower, not the bloom,
...
Every generation thinks it’s the best
and thinks it’s the worst;
we think in superlatives and comparatives
and who will be first.
...
You’re always dropping things—
friends, lovers, world view—
just as in November deciduous trees
reduce their sap and strew
...
His spirit lay cracked,
fissured like the branched webwork
on an antique vase, still viable,
but flawed.
...
Everything is circuitous,
coiled or coiling like a snake,
spiraling, spinning,
whirling in my mind.
...
Can I love them for what they were,
after the wind, once their friend,
has incised their delicate necks,
like an ethereal Nosferatu, famished
...
Cornflowers and asters in fragrant meadows,
where a goat with a goatee poses and a dappled cow lows,
please me more than English gardens and potted ferns
and pink hibiscus in mock Grecian urns.
...
Definitions are dangerous—
sinuous loops within loops,
mulligan soups,
tenuous.
...
Not unlike the constancy of the sun,
always descending in its assigned place,
a little north, a little south,
depending on the season,
...