The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.

A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect l…

I take a wolf's rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears.

The maple tree that night Without a wind or rain Let go its leaves Because its time had come.

So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.