nothing that you can hear
but the cold creek moving
over the old pebbles

  and that’s how I almost died
     of foolishness
        in beautiful Florida.

Why do it? shrilled the bird,
the as-yet-unnamed, a
candidate for new coinage,
namely widewit,

“Hold, just grab the grass,” counseled my link
to the humanized, floricultured top,
when, on the incoming tide, the waves
tall and brown in a fog, basaltic

A closer look reveals the blue-dark knot
undone, the torn tissues of the lips,
the disheveled velvets and violet silks
of a woman hurrying to a tryst

Put one hand
Next to a light-switch
With the other hand
Feeling for the wall.

The windows stream with fish,
the gold luck of carp,
the tiny silver luck of minnows,
while the earth gives back her wealth

Her heart fails her and the body holding it
lies on its side, the lungs taking on fluid
so it will be, we are told, like drowning
we can’t stop and each week’s watch is a hot

Alexander, first over the wall,
collapsed battered by stones. Instantly
the Macedonian companions
gathered their shields over his body

  Where is paradise without the gate?
Ask any gardener, his bags of bonemeal busy
  keeping the weedy world at bay.
Within its boxwood walls, like that great kitchen