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My dear, even my ear is trying to eat itself in its attempt to forget you.

“How is it fair that you know who I am but I have to guess about you?”

The hut was cluttered with the skulls and bones of small animals.

I understood that life could end without warning, even young lives.

I cradled the lifeless bird in my hand and marveled at its beauty.

Is there some one way a guy should be on his wedding day, dickwad?

The sedan clipped their front bumper and pitched Bill’s car into a slide.

It could be our baby. Her eyebrow, its perfect arc, the pale blue vein.

It was here—over the highway—where my mother got confused.

Que voulez-vous? I said. Patisserie, she said and smiled. Pastry, I said. Well, that’s predictable.

I knew in the dream that I was a condor in the shape of a girl.

It will be years before the kids see us as real people, not just as parents.

How can we go on believing each day won’t be the one that flames out?

The Renaissance mastered the illusion of depth on a flat plane.

In the seventies a skier’s mettle was measured by the length of his skis.

I didn’t want to start a poem with night where there should be a name.

Death is our common ancestor. It doesn’t care who we have dined with.

Grandfather advised me: learn a trade. I learned to sit at a desk.

Art is a way for the mind to master the body, even if it is not one’s own.

I was nagged by those boxes from my old life stacked in the garage.

Then I graduate to a four-digit mortgage inside an ornate gate.

A real or imagined boundary, crossed. End of the line. Lined out.

Oar blades, vast swirls of cirrus at dawn. The dead move within us.

He folds on himself like a sheet kicked off the foot of a bed.

He smelled like the bars my mother took me to in the middle of the day.

One makes one’s peace with words in a poem and space in a dream.

You can call it karma if you can see that far, or joy-begets-sorrow.

We’ve seen a lot of smaller ranches bought up by outside money.