Tonight listening to you falling asleep 900 miles away

I talk about the kitten’s cottony belly, his ruthless teeth,

not saying any of the other,

feeling the searing holes there below, here above

and I realize the oily undreamt dream I’ve been given;

Morning and again,
mind’s eye has her spreading jam,
all the greater sadness
left to rest of day.

A man says he carries letters
in Portland, Oregon.

Not that he is a letter carrier
or mailman,

but that he is “a man who carries
letters.”

Long ago we quit offering our tails
like the others—prairie chicken, peacock—
though we gasp when they tremble
to beckon a mate. Even the wild turkey
that once climbed our neighbor’s roof

You sat at your computer, watched me
play with our granddaughter,
listened to us invent a world
of mermaids and magic wands
where dreams bloom large as sunflowers.

He came out of the gray huddle,
an avalanche of a man,
broken and vast, without forgiveness.

He knew spit and strike,
choke and an eternal bad morning,

sticks rubbery thin
the kind my mother called a switch
broke skin on her legs
since father caught her in mud
with white church shoes

She’s back to the bottle again,
after an early fever that gambled
away its taint on a sucker’s bet
that the bulldog at her throat
could be traded for a nice coffee

circle of sandwiches and half-smoked cigars–
Friday night dinner with the
Polamalu Fan Club. The playing cards are all
Worn on the edges, and the

I wasn’t born in Brooklyn,
or Boston, or San Francisco, or
somewhere equally as interesting
with its well-storied, cobblestone
streets and brownstones. I was

When his mirror broke, he replaced it
with a book: ‘The History of Fog’
and stood in the cold March surf
of his imagination, hoping to drown

from the ankles up. Years earlier