Strangers come to caretake and her tongue
lies large and quiet in its crook.
Across the street black tin wardrobes and twin

The apples are a charcoal gray,
though they manage to shine hard
in the late afternoon's sheer. Rain

He looked beneath the rock to find the god
that he had hidden there—that's Oscar
Wilde on Wordsworth's Sublime,

The world could see his share of light was spent.
The hearts in his cafe were mostly warm,
but had to speak to make it evident

In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly, 
to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy. In my day, 
our fragrances had agency, our exhausted clocks complained 

How does one know an El Greco?
I can't say, but I just know
something's always out

      It's a morning of snow and crows storming the bare treetops
As if they invade the eves of a burned-out cathedral.
Where are the children? A ludicrous posture of mourning

Boswell ran over to see if they lied;
Johnson declared it impossible, never
could that unbeliever whose work he decried

No crisp white swans glide
conventionally across
the mortared, mud-room shower's
utilitarian cinder-block walls.

 Pleasing, plump, and completely pig:
Bottom-barreling boys who alternate wholly.
Cocks bursting, all over the bed, bungholes
By tongue and groove, illicit abundance