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My world must not be made of brief encounters along the neat squares.

You must not be afraid of what waits after death, my past self says.

I am almost never standing in the ocean, not that way, not anymore.

The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

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

I see the garden far away in itself reflected in the polished spade.

A question from one of your favorite songs what would you do

Before we too vanish, we hike to where three trails converge.

I do not expunge the past but ignite the fuse to a whistling pinwheel.

The notebook’s cotton pages are spangled with axes and sickles.

It’s life that is hard: sleeping, eating, loving, and dying are easy.

you here and these words also here meeting in your shared beauty

Finger tracing the terrain, you hold me through autumn’s loss of color.

We drink to Nixon’s impeachment again, this time with the good stuff.

she thrust to where her gut bucked acid & gave out a taurine heave

cannibal chowder and a kiss by the splashing voices of a pool

I’m tired of the song the rain sings in June, the chorus of hope.

The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so we drive on.

Show me your darkness, your nothing-to-see and everything to touch.

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

His mooseness was implacable, the light behind him from the trees.

An empty day without events. And that is why it grew immense as space.

All of this leaves me floating in seas of prehistory and indeterminacy.

What felt like sanctity now felt like nothingness, like death.

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

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

Before giant pandas earn heir name, they cub pinkly and mewling.

“I’m sorry,” I wrote, “but I have to go back to the bookstore.” My only plan was to plead for my old job back. To my surprise, it worked. The law was safe; the law was my father. I decided to go to law school.

Every life is an imperfect continuation of another.