Who would have thought—too much simultaneity: 
The Swan Planters hovering above the windbeaten 
Statue of the Virgin Mary who casts her gaze down 

Even Atalanta’s tongue was turned eventually.
Parting the high raceway grasses
she bent down for that last apple,

An implied corkscrew of peel garners the apple.
For days, wholly curved, the fruit has rested here.
The high lights of various mornings have settled

There is a kind
of whiteness to the day,
everything pared down,

The addition of solitude untrammeled,
one and more and more but always
the inner life astray,

                                1
To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited
landscape as far from nature as you can get
without actually leaving the planet, a man-made

Once upon a time. A six-year-old boy almost might be raising himself
from the waters of sleep, onto a beach made glass as a wave’s sheet pulls taut.
His left arm props his torso, his legs (still sleeping?) trail behind like a seal’s

Dear Uncle Chris, welcome back to my mind
   after so many years. Forgive me for
         not thinking you up sooner: the coiled-vine

The seven-story trees
on the jogger-thronged hill
beyond your back garden

The whale eye of the sun in the thin gray overcast,
walleye of a gray wall of animal
washed ashore