Table of Contents
[I drove all the way to Cape Disappointment] 3
[The problem with sweetness is death] 4
[intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me] 5
[I met a man a dying man] 6
[It is abominable, unquenchable by touch] 7
[Sometimes I can't feel it] 8
[I could do it. I could walk into the sea] 9
[Press a foot into this beach] 10
[The best is when you respond] 11
[From this bench I like to call my bench] 12
[Poetry, the only father, landscape] 13
[Here on this edge] 14
[To return from Paradise] 15
[What is it you feel, I asked Kurt] 16
[Listening to "Summertime"] 17
[There is a certain state of grace] 18
["No need to sparkle"] 19
[My earliest memory] 20
[Since age three, I went looking] 21
[Who wants to be soft? I don't] 22
[I was raised in a rectangle] 23
[I was not a large child] 24
[Freak accidents do happen] 25
[My first crush was Wild Bill Hickok] 26
[They lived next door, four boys] 27
[I suck so many cough drops] 28
[I floated I flew I fell to Earth] 29
[That bar, World of the Satisfyin' Place] 30
[Labels now slip off me like clothes] 31
[All at once David went catatonic] 32
[I want drugs again; whimsy] 33
[His body was barely cold] 34
[The lambs this year are dumb] 35
[One's got an eye thing] 36
[When the lamb humped her leg] 37
[After the pigs and lambs and rabbits] 38
[The parents tried to build a little Eden] 39
[The fat suffering of the farrowing sow] 40
[The patriarch of Jesus Camp is dead] 41
[It was a land without charm] 42
[The White Rabbit was before] 43
[They wander in, two Southdowns] 44
[He came to us all the way down here with us] 45
[For a couple years, I slept nights] 46
[Once, I took a Greyhound north] 47
[I have slept in many places] 48
[My first night in New York] 49
[I'm watching A Face in the Crowd] 50
[I can't rest, can't get no relief] 51
[I should have been in cinema] 52
[Parties among strangers] 53
[There's something to be said for having] 54
[Margaret Sanger did the first one] 55
[I saw Robert Creeley] 56
[The famous poets came for us] 57
[Yes, I saw them all, saw them, met some] 58
[I can't say I loved punk] 59
[Thirty-nine years ago is nothing] 60
[We all have our trauma nadir] 61
[I aborted two daughters] 62
[I fell on an incline, talus, tibia] 63
[There is a force that breaks the body] 64
[It's that time of spring] 65
[OD'd on his Suboxone] 66
[I hoisted them, two drug dealers] 67
[Freelance artist. That's what you say] 68
[How do you stand being so virtuous] 69
[Where is the drug to drug] 70
[Then, I account it high time to get to sea] 71
[Which, he asks me, is your favorite story] 72
[She's a big James Stewart fan] 73
[Why would God be so mean, he asks] 74
[Then when I grew up] 75
[What do you think Elvis's best song was] 76
[On what day do you think Jesus] 77
[Maybe we wander] 78
[I've lived with death from the beginning] 79
[I fell in love with death] 80
[I could do the love] 81
[I've encountered the exoskeleton] 82
[All lives have their tropes] 83
[In the dream, my mother called my name] 84
[I dreamed of it again, my dad's body] 85
[I dreamed I had to find my way] 86
[Goldenrod, I could say, you know] 87
[How will I leave this life, like I left my job] 88
[I dreamed a color, no plot, a color] 89
[He called from San Francisco] 90
[I want to zero in on what he looked like] 91
[He said it bummed him out his dick] 92
[I saw a little movie of a person stroking] 93
[Things feel partial. My love for things is partial] 94
[Death does not exist in poetry] 95
[I was tethered to this Earth] 96
[Abrupt lines on the nature of beauty] 97
[Literature is dangerous business] 98
[I wanted to be the boy in the book] 99
[My literary tastes of late are manic] 100
[Chekhov sits waiting for me] 101
[Either all of this is an apparition or I am] 102
[Mountains black today, hiding] 103
[For twenty-six days I lived] 104
[When I am away I miss] 105
[It's a real Garden of Eden story] 106
[And then landscape was all there was] 107
[The emergent self is not a self that loves] 108
[Takes time to get to minimalism] 109
[All things now remind me] 110
[Those days, if I consider them] 111
[The world today is wet] 112
[The small stuff, the care] 113
[I can't see her clearly] 114
[It won't kill me to be sad again] 115
[I wish I still smoked] 116
[The sonnet, like poverty] 117
[My favorite scent is my own funk] 118
[You know what living means] 119
[Marry dull] 120
[Lately I've been feeling about poetry] 121
[Ever since Elise brought up] 122
[My private parts are many] 123
[Back then its hair was Cleopatraed] 124
[To say that I'm a witch] 125
[After forty years] 126
[For me it's going to be] 127
[I courted her, that musky tart] 128
[My tits are bruised] 129
[I hope when it happens] 130
Notes 133
Acknowledgments 135