Alone in the house your father built
and you’ve always lived in, you walk with your cane
toward the door to the basement.

The great blue heron’s tinctured swerve
fires its yellow bill with the trout's alloy.
Why in place of nature cure

Overshadowed by colors
Like the deep
Sea of the dictionary

is too much with me daylong and
in my dreams my mind is invaded

 The apparition of these faces in the bough;
Crowds on a wet, black petal.

The apparition of these boughs in the face;
Crowds on a wet, black petal.

Look how the snow drifts
       flare on the Soracte’s slopes
—there, straining branches

You’re loose,
sometimes good
and lonely almost

I  Midpoint of summer. Horizontal light
   picks out the fly in the dusty web; mousedroppings
   fresh on my desk each morning; poems; letters;

Mouse-ear, quack grass, shepherdspurse, are beautiful
but weeds. Their greedy merits need another kind
of seeing than we normally bring. There is no sputtering