Smell of iron in the wind off the mesa–the man at the desk looks up, tasting axe head, knife blade, ghost’s chains, his mother’s womb blood.

*

Before bed, turning out the last light in the house, she saw the chemical formula for darkness inscribe itself inside her eyelids.

*

He felt ill and lay down as the last bus disappeared into the tunnel with men in suits reading headlines, the markets sliding into fever.

*

In the poem, a girl in a library sleeps, her face on a book; I read her skin in its paper, spot of drool in the margin, a hair in the gutter.

*

All the angels in Rilke gather at the bookshop to argue with Whitman: who touches this book touches what?

*

A couple in a convertible at midnight, arguing bitterly, moon half eroded by the solar wind; at roadside a dead coyote, half eaten by ants.

*

Willows laced over the pond water of history, their image fractured by the ordnance of a war only the dead remember, or a simple wind.

*

What happened at the end, when everyone thought there was no one left to think, was simple: they forgot it all had ended, and went on.

*

There was always filth, someone had to touch it, love it, lest it fade like the traces, eons after, at great distance, of a burnt-out star.

*

At the end of the world an empty beach, empty sea, empty wind, flat, lifeless, leaving nothing behind but its poisonous etching of salt.

Day-old snow under a stone sky at midnight: and beyond flattened trees, in the shadow of a rust-eaten combine, one animal invisibly moving.

*

The man with the rifle in the blind sits still; his uniform chafes but he cannot move or the face in his scope might ghost and go on living.

*

Wind-driven dust eats at this rock face as it has for centuries, leaving its tracery of scars, its crows-feet, the aneurysm of erosion.

*

The blind girl in the library passes her hands over dusty spines like a pianist, like a pickpocket.

*

The translucence of agate. Shade of the blue fir. Track of a slug, luminous in starlight. Garbage truck. Brickbat. A dead mouse in the wall.

*

If you hadn’t recalled the cabbage and turned suddenly back, the man in the suit would never have lost his pistol. Osmosis. Wages of gnosis.

*

A dark chamber in the spine of the boar holds the ozone-colored powder that crystallizes his hunger. He lives in his body only. Die for him.

*

Her eyes convulsed, then closed as the soldier entered her, grinding against her belly the rifle’s muzzle, the bracket securing the bayonet.

*

Dawn should be immaculate, burning you clean, but smoke pours out of the wreckage, shrapnel, and a photograph of you on the train, waving.