After long hours of mindless labor,
yoked with debt, they are released like oxen

to graze in the remnant grass of another day.

A California of snow and the surprise
Of illness. I throned myself in the white
Noise of its silence and watched as the world

 By year’s end, some couples used book lights,
or even night-lights, so as not to make love
in total dark. What some told, others took in

Nothing about the food, the wine, the subjects
Of that night’s passions. Nothing even about
The weather—rain most likely, the damp seeping

not to steer but to steady
the boat when I steer into un-

when I steer into strange

 Of course that's what pumpkins do,
they grow
as everything in a garden does

When the poet arrived in our city
he was welcomed with storms and floods.
The earth turned to mud and the mud gave way

Look out! my nightmare shouted,
as she crashed across the porch, flailing the shadows with a crutch.
Dark wind blew a storm of dust, or feathers, and lightning

 The leaves are curled like fingers from which the wrist
Is broken. The X-rayed wrist in four parts, with a
                                                                                triangular island

What makes Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
so hard to put down is his wild branching rhetoric.
It’s not enough to trace pathologies of mind, whatever