They called it a landslide as though 
everything shifted and the weak 
and strong alike were buried alive.

On this small island that undoes us daily,gently,
It’s hard to take too seriously, too intently
A town whose name means town

Drones out brittle, weary invocations, the certainty
                                      of fruit now distant as the first word
On God’s tongue. Such disarray. So much leaf-rot,

It was foolish planning to arrive at noon 
But, in retrospect, it doesn’t really matter. 
There was a bar, after all, where we bought water 

Once in the sweet dark of an empty house,
All alone while the others slept upstairs,
I knelt before a memorial candle

The Wish Department

Today I sight-read the last 
Schubert sonata: he wanders between keys: evasive

Leather banquettes in old green edge the room.
A drab green of animal scales, guarded 
Under agave, on days too hot to move. 

Another cow was floating by us,
hilariously calm, bell-deep 
in milkweed and tansy. She looked 

She Said in the LADIES,
in the rest area LADIES on the road to 
Terre Haute. Plenty of angels, she said again. 

Not just because a child draws him — pie-faced and frontal, 
Grinning—it’s hard to watch the man’s head and hands take shape 
From a black magic marker, despite the other colors in the box: