Not the wrist of the sunset
which sinks every night
below the electrical wires—

The photographer is blind to what he sees—
He hits the shutter: indifferent film will hold the scene together.

Clarence was a chosen person that they got somewhere
To be lower than a cook, but higher than a dishboy.

How quickly

How thick

Midlife pools.

After the rabbits and doves 
and the sawed-in-two lady, 
slowly unscrew your arms 

What is this bizarre collection of titles
(quasi-porno side by side with classics)

The story of how the animal was sent
across the Mediterranean on a ship,
wearing a strip of parchment around her neck

While we were waiting for the movie to begin,
my wife caught up with her old friend Maryann,
and because I could only make out every
third or fourth word, my attention fluttered off
in search of something else and landed on
the thirty-five-ish couple sitting three rows
in front of us—the backs of their heads

We’d sentenced everything that had become our lives
to a year’s confinement in a small dark cell,

In 1834, when Alexander Kinglake
stood by the banks of the Sava River,
at the frontier of the Ottoman Empire,