Staring out the window as trees and wind play Martha Graham
Sauntering the neighborhood as plums fall from a neighbor's tree
and what does it matter if I begin every line with a gerund?

Families, they f*$( you up. you know the poet, and the Granta issue
Why poetry? These comfort me.

Too much time with family
they look like me and we have history
and pathology in common

My Mom is gone and my rhythm is jangled
no matter how terribly we danced together

School year beginning I arise and soon
will go now into classrooms
my friend says she feels privileged
to work in this system she opposes

and I admire those who meta-think
and those whose arithmetical mode
is to add themselves to the equation
and I want to go on a vacation

New York Times Crossword Poem Draft

Once saw-toothed tigers saw to
the vermin, and camp
meant dogs around an aura, lath
met plaster, last night, last year, I mean
before the grafted apple and oboe,
before the plow, Euro never
met yen, the trilobyte, and a cobra
rose without a basket, no one asked it
but we share the ride
with oh who knows but all is faster
than despair - I cling to the spar
and far off land fades, a sprinter
from a burning building, present past
and I didn't ask, and now it's ash
as I will be though I want to burn.
I'm out of tune, you hold the hymnal
I cannot hear, you're not aloof
is anything indelible? Erase
what trace we leave, our fallen sash
another chistled stone.
Don't leave me alone, I need oomph
for every tibia and ulna
There's ahead to love not just a sled
ride down and out but grace
before the years-off grave.

View of Mt. Rainier from Paradise
wild flowers in spring bloom - September -
lupines and crimson paint brush -
purple! magenta! the upper slopes
puff painted green below the hem
of white snow, glaciers stark
and stippled with crevasses beneath
a sky painted crisply blue. Summer's
new pearly everlasting and a marmot
chewing placid as the neighbor's cow
if the neighbor had a cow.