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Lily hated Ray’s cancer. She couldn’t see it or cure it.

He had come to weavers’ Harris to make some testament.

Each year we fail to imagine how the days will blanch, the air will harden.

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.

It had always been this way. Mothering, for my mother, was a cameo role.

On Saturdays I listen to folk music, lead a life devoted to exodus.

I give you a real blue song the mountains hold under their foot.

A rider prances toward the ash, a sailor looks for meaning in unrequited hearts.

Children can be seen as worldly things, not as souls with broken mirrors.

I want him to remember me hanging on his crosshairs.

A cuckoo calls the hours like an old clock, only not the hours we mean.

Silence, a weapon of choice, hung between them, cut through the air.

What if white men became supremely good at making up for our past?

Make haste, my love, I am redrawing the scale of escape.

When you are a father, want sons. There is some math in this.

Those moments are all I want. I want a life of this. He sighs and I sigh.

The ashes of a human being are not ash. The body burns into wood.

Another year another almanac, a washed-out castle in the sand.

Divorced. Wife living with someone else. Pregnant with his child.

He’s an excellent student. It’s just that . . . he thinks ideas are real.

It’s other things than the like of you would make a person afeard.

It lay slumped where they’d dragged it, a fright of an animal.

The old-timer outside the guard station was knifing his own tires.

He picked up the knife I had there, and said he’d kill me if ever I told.

A knife left by an untraced foot marks where to lay the body—fácil.

Under pillows of snow, the creek shushes the sharp architecture of ice.

I roam the dirt with the law in my teeth, a widower in search of a widow.

I realized you were my fourth love, and the system was always doomed.

This box is full of wires, energy that moves in ways I can hardly fathom.