Would shy cereus or sugar glider,
swing-shift foreman or taxi driver,
call the day better
than the night?

Or say the moon
has only one side,
that which we can see?

Is a dollar worth more
face up in a palm
and less face down?

Who would wish for only
a right hand?
Does anyone still call the left
sinister?

You waited at the station entrance.
I was late. My hair had turned gray
but there you were, all the snow gone,
all the leaves blown, the leopard sun
having leapt across a life never lived.

there was blue smoke    beyond the house a field
at day’s end    slow darkening
in the tall corn    our children scurried
invisible in the maze    voices absorbed  
by evening’s onset    their voices echo

To survive, Siberia, or to survive Siberia:
neither seems possible. So cold, so boundless,
so wild there are parts as yet unnamed.

What’s to like
if not contrast?

Shadows beneath
the model’s sharp

cheekbones, her ample
yet precise lips.

We wanted to tell someone everything

(or everyone something)—

how large and limp

the leaves were

in the half-sun,

but what is “half-sun,”

finally?

A human begins
by claiming

to be something else:

a red bird
in a picture book;

a little red
Corvette.

Je fais ce que je peux.
Which is to say, midwinter
and poems are as difficult as flowers.

Each day the light diminishes earlier. Colors at dusk are softer with an
opulence they lack under full sun. My eyes strain with the beautiful, painful
squint. My wax flowers, my painter’s palette—a floral encaustic! The papery
papavers are waxy in the frigid morning air, but by noon I can see my fingers
through them, fluttering, a swim of color, red under red.