When I lay my head in my mother’s… I think how day hides the stars, the way I lay hidden once, waiting inside my mother’s singing to hers… how she carried me on her back

That sparrow on the iron railing, not worth a farthing, purchases a… its shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. It’s up to no good,

It wasn’t the bright hems of the… that brushed my face and I opened… to see from a cleft in rock His ba… it’s a wasp perched on my left che… my eyes closed and stand perfectly…

Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,

I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son… My little root who won’t drink mil… Little pale foot sunk in unheard-o… Little clock spring newly wet

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be… of the boarded-up well in the back… and the ladder in the attic?

And when, in the city in which I… even my most excellent song goes u… andI mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts of avenues, and tunnel sunken night in search…

People have been trying to kill me… a man tells his son, trying to exp… the wisdom of learning a second to… It’s the same old story from the p… about my father and me.

That scraping of iron on iron when… rises, what is it? Something the w… quit with, but drags back and fort… Sometimes faint, far, then suddenl… beyond the screened door, as if so…

He gossips like my grandmother, th… with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.

Choose a quiet place, a ruins, a house no more a house, under whose stone archway I stood one day to duck the rain.

It’s late. I’ve come to find the flower which blossoms like a saint dying upside down. The rose won’t do, nor the iris. I’ve come to find the moody one, t…

In the dark, a child might ask, W… just to hear his sister promise, An unfinished wing of hea… just to hear his brother say, A house inside a house,