Who would have thought he’d sit / so still so long, but he settles right / into our row, props his head on the velvet / armrest basking in the company

Their forever never lasts that long. Gone by Christmas.

The chicken crows at midnight. Crows at four o’clock in the morning. Crows when it rains. Crows when the sun sets. Crows when sirens blare down our street. Only stops crowing to eat.

We talked about light and dark, how to render it in paintings and drawings, and how it connects to spirit. We talked about Emerson and Thoreau. They connected their faiths to mine, to the pantheism I developed out there in the woods, and to art as faith. As I worked with artists in prison over the next couple of decades, I continued to see this transcendental connection to light and dark through their eyes.

You see the flower's form leak into itself. A self. Some things in America still make sense. I open my junk mail, Disney red. Your family. Liquid uttered out into the night freezes your dreams undone. Veracity leaves its whispers. Make an orchestra instead. Every bitten breath

All day I have been sitting around / waiting to be thin. / There was a time I was more or less pure. / I still am...

...the scritch-scratch of No Remedy passing first under the fall of sighs before the bridge of suicides, meaningless beneath the blue feather tips of kingfisher who shuns the deeper blue...

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

To “stet” is the act of making a textual change and then changing it back and so on and so forth. In the spirit of “stetting,” Stet also acts as…

“When I built my first stretcher, it was like finding a big surprise. It let me reinforce what I had been doing with painting, which was playing around…