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I never knew that the song of the first summer cicadas could ease my hips

Crows rasp from branches, scatter debris across unfinished plots.

Always I obliged the urban tree, any speechless unblessed nature.

At the memorial service, I could barely hear the student read.

I want to be bright scarves, soft rain, seabirds pecking at receipts.

Death is a lack, I suppose, and love more so. But I will not falter.

They taught us do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it?

You walk and the world bends toward you like leaves waiting for rain.

We’ve seen the news. We know the story. How even our bodies hurt us.

This is the day when the saints all go silently to church in France.

Everything they needed was there. Everything they needed, they had.

He longed only for Claire’s strange seriousness, her silent focus.

Alva knows the storm is coming. The ground is falling away.

Desperately, children: I am in desperate need for desperate need.

Water the boxed dirt, and up she’ll push, rising in red-streaked blossoms.

I stand within her walls with not a shred of terror, not a word of jeer.

Karen was, in that moment, nothing, emptiness. She was oblivion.

We have harvested nothing more than the stench of middle age.

For sixty or maybe seventy years this sidewalk has been lying here.

As Andromeda, I practiced lapidary, cut my bare foot on the nautilus shell.

I want to cut loose from her each wistful sigh I hear escape her lips.

His fingers traveling through these notes can assuage, I think, all pain.

It’s another thing to have the beloved hesitate, silent, on the porch.

When I land we argue over the little hazards a marriage is made of.

Tell me our species matters more, tell me that, and I, I will crawl back.

The girl marched directly up to me, glaring, and said, “You hit my dog.”

Bone unspools its musculature to the crush of atmosphere.

We need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly as a plane’s wing.

do you asks pretty sue know what I love what pretty please tell us

The first time we love, how tight we hang on to keep from drowning.