He utilizesform for a striking lecture;young poets shiverinexperience,but thaw over their own work,fertilize magic.

Who is so fancy, esoterica saves the day?Who is the Yogi, Namaste?

Once, I took the penny whistle you gave me and discovered a spotby the roaring falls where I could play as loud as I wanted. I lay in the bifurcated trunkof a low-slung birch tree. The sun peeked through applauding leaves, high overhead.

And no matter what closet we were thrown in, up what river we were sold for an embarrassment, or worse, traded for a bottle of gin--we’d carry on in playful stitches, friends‘til the end…which came sooner than wished.

I wonder what became of you, your JohnnyRotten skin, no Emerald City eyes.You'd have been a beauty if you let inferiority steam your glasses with its candor, sans laughter.

Up past the old lime kiln built into the side of a hill we take a hard right at a clearing lined by brittle apple trees still willing to bear fruit.I snap sticks beneath my feetand steal pictures of the view while you reach for something sweet, as much as it bowsto you.

If in poetry court she was calledto testify on matters whereI was condemned to imprisonment: parking my egoat a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme,dealing stanzaics to children, shootingoff my mouth, getting cute, for even thislatest attempt at verse, she would tell the whole truth,she would admit from the pitof her unsung brilliance,from all of the paintings and poemsshe herself has been makingand storing in the vast empire of her singing soul, your Honor, my daughter is guiltyof plagiarizing my cells.

what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of light, and even Stephen Hawking's mind would miss it?

There’s a pressure at all hours of the day only a poem can assuage.

You think it’s a game?Unintelligible? Ha!Envision no spoons.This is serious.It is a matter of joyversus emptiness.

...we’re not even really hiking,more like meandering in cinematic light.

He may take long walksin the raining darkalmost aimlesslyto a spot of soaked grassin a neighbor’s open field.He’s decided this is the placefor you and him to meet again.

Sure, I watched the workmen come and lower large pieces of rotten sheetrock and lift new clean panels on a pulleyfrom that same window months ago, and I could have written then, but I must have sensed her coming, the smoker, so I waited.

I dream for an absentee and oft maligned device—the accident-maker, the soul-taker, my camera; its factory guaranteedthird eye, without which I am duly dimand memory denied. No picturesfor my contrived Arbus to declare, excepting some stitch of Sextonmanages these sentences of despair.

If you knew you were going to lose your memorybut you could choose five things you’d never forget, what would they be—a certain face, a taste, a scent,a touch; how deepin this, the middle of your life?

Time’s relativity is considered and abandoned, for the more revelatory experiences of starlightin strands, and pearly floors that span as far as absolute compassion...

...you hold a poemthat functions half as personalnote and half as telescopeto the heightsawaiting us all.

And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seedsfor the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.

Would it be enough to rock on a stormless sea with each our separate memories tuned to the state of the sinking sun?

I tell you once and for all—in front of the angel pictures on the wall, that I am not a host to load-bearing ghosts or headyentities, and if I was ever holy, I have fallen farinto the dense atmosphere of the living.

As a woman still,without the right kind of mouth,my tongue’s of no use.

Think of the Christmas presentof gashes you opened when, in an attempt to be Superman, you slid in stocking feet on a slippery wood floor and crashed half way through a window. Hopes of heroism dashed on the heels of no clear sighting of Santa.

Even the bees I'd swear were sent to protect us in the delicate business of hives and honey are stung to silence by the news that something winged has lost its flight.

I write for pages,get lost in the mezzaninehidden from stages.

Such is a communityof inviolable immunity, protectedfrom tampering or harpooningmutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse to shrink us (at the shoreline from our lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging scrutiny to sink us.

In history, the bleeding from arbitrary beatings, forced breedings, and choked-heatbreathing could almost be withstood by soul-feeding songs sung, or listlessly hummed just to go on.

The outfit, tight in places, and loose in some, says as much in the buttons as it does in cuffs.

Once lively peonies nowwind-weary, and ragged at the edges, hang their heavy crowns; rain on their backs,one final act, beforedetaching from the stemand falling down.

A giant motherboard of geese,unruffled by the statepolice, swarmed in unison,in harmony...

Dear Anonymous, I've got a secret I know you can keep it because you don't really exist....This is what shapes you, this is what makes you as authentic as you are fake.

It was as if someone had leftthe bird thereas a kind of telegramof feathers, oily feathersthat looked like they’d struggled,shuttered a little before letting gointo flightforever.

She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open doorof the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.

Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....