Urging our oxen toward the risen sun,
our stick plows stirring up the dust in waves,
also, in waves, we taste those words come back,

There will be spiders the size of your ears, drinks
that will make you stupid, matches you'll long
to strike; there will be mop-ups the size of Rhode Island.

Much
of life is Dutch
one-digit operations

By silence he meant it's bad enough
To squander words on paper. Don't waste them.
Along with your breath, on air. By exile

Every year the flowers come back in the same order:
                     first the crocus
like all the teenage girls on the block deciding

Swallowed by blood-red vinyl of the hotel lounge,
I drain the last of a grasshopper—my first cocktail,
ever. You loosen your tie. Dad, glare at headlines

Airborne it's like a dream. It's dreamy. It's for
all the world like something
ants have made, something gigantic fomented

Were I there, leaning against a London building's
filthy stonework, gazing by chance into a street
at the moment of this carriage's transit

The sunlight was like wire on the water,
that morning the ghost ship drove upriver.
The only witness was a Jersey cow.

I can bang at the lyre, but make it sing?
Each time the muse whistles through my spine,
she numbs like a drug, and I nod