When cloud cover com- 
plicates the crossing 
all we can do is look 

 I tried, and each attempt was a fiasco. 
I yearned, but every love of mine was wrong. 
I needed, and the shame was overwhelming. 

If you’d seen
        lightning nets in clear water, 
midnight blue beyond the reefs;

On leftovers ana breakfast   like the spleenish wulf the wéstenas chase. 

He sets out hungry,   nose in the wind, up the wulfhleoþu. 

After a luckless trek,   he gilleþ; and gaunt companions answer 

Rowans—not yet fully rowan red 
not yet in that tone they take on later 
of ember, berry, October, and death. 

Things you said in drugstores 
when buying painkillers 
or at your tailor’s

Never lonelier than in August: 
hour of plenitude—in the country 
the red and golden tassels, 

O that we might be our ancestors’ ancestors. 
A clump of slime in a warm bog. 
Life and death, fertilizing and parturition 

The solitary molar of a streetwalker 
whose body had gone unclaimed 
had a gold filling. 

After a long night swimming
In the dry dark of a book
I heard outside my window