Table of Contents
Fixed Fire (or, My Leonine Tao)
Something Else (or, Our Samenesses)
Not Everything in Life Will Come to Song
Some Things That Sleep Should Not Be Interrupted By
Some Things That Sleep Might (or Mightn’t) Interrupt
Poem for My Wife, in Anticipation of an Empty Nest
The Palindromic Means and Ends of Sleep
Wooden Drakes (or, Much Else as Well)
Cerebrusphere (or, Haas Contra Jagger)
The Dark Star of Gilchrist Haas
Welcome Back! (or, The Grim Ascendancy of Orange Man)
1. That World of Blue and Green
2. Tabula Rasa
6. Baby Hands
8. Asshole
10. Douglass Speaks (or, Plucked Orangutan)
11. Shit-gibbon
12. In the Words of Colbert (or, Through Celluloid and Fake News)
13. Individual One
14. Fine Forms
15. Our Century 21
Die, Stupid! (A Sestina for AOC)
Hymn of the Perfect Aubade and Its Nocturnes
The Weight, 2020 (or, It Ain’t for Free!)
Ontological Layman (or, Hǎi Yào!)
These Two Continua (or, Triumph and Rage)
To Haunt and Harrow (Wagner’s Liebestod Melody)
(Not Quite an) Ode to the Non-Rhotic R
Brother, You Are Not an Ism (or, Crumpled Burger Bag)
Ownmost (or, Tones of Grim and Woe)
Forked Lightning: Ten New Villanelles
I. In Which Four Villanellians Meet in Heaven
II. Time and Rhyme
III. The Age of Prose
IV. New Metaphors of Elemental Fire
VI. The Dialectic of Surfeit and Need
VII. Funessence, Square of Life
VIII. Furlongs Thick and Fathoms Deep
IX. Accessing the Real (or, Dazzling Chrome)
X. The Universe is God Enough for Me
Escritoire (or, This Novel World)
COVID Cornucopia
To Own His Each
Ain’t in the Bible
Like Walter Mitty
From the Poet’s Grassy Knoll
Nobler Topics
Null Set
The Human Tempo
With Brimming Carafes
Cacophonic Clump
Four and a Dozen Score
Like Aesop
Quinbus Trumpus Flestrin
Like the Botched Stratagem of Sir Belvedere
Light Their Fire
Obsidian Automatic
Unlike Shelley
Flowing Freely off the Spool
Meridian
The Historied Ascendancy of the Virtual
Resumption
In Tens and Twelves
Foremost and First
Venus and Haas (or, Love Lines)
Stubby and Magniloquent
Porcelain Double
Impetuous Peerer
This Puzzling Void
Ab initio
Serpentine
Bard of Me
A Question for Taverns and Kegs
The Triumph of Life (or, An Organ with
Innumerable Stops)
Hermity
Complete Unknowns (or, Shredded Lore)
“First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” (or, Bovine Bleats)
A Poem with No Police
The Laziest Element (or, Imagine What It Takes to Be a Dick!)
Famishing in Fame Without a Name
Under Diremption
Our Earthly Lost and Found
Aftermath (or, So Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now)
After Aftermath (or, Until the Everlasting Fire)
Without Being Snide
Coda: And Dragons in the Crease
More from the Valley of Shifting Sands
I. Never Less Than One More Page
II. I’ll Buy a Drone to Fly Inside My Head
III. Sarabande
IV. Shadow Life (or, Like Fey Bo Peep)
VI. Material
Appendix: The Face and the Many Faces of Gong Li