A poem from my first collection, Without Paradise:

STEVENS ASTRIDE THE HEMISPHERES

— for Thom Salmon

Mnemosyne upreared amid atrocity concurs:

this looking backward is a not so accidental

death and dismemberment policy after all,

appended to one’s life and health; however,

squat caryatids, resentful though proud,

agree that, whether a bequest or metaphor

(those fixed, equivocating lions), history

is more than books and books of big stuff and

(roaring leonisimus or sleeping as you pass)

requires no notice in advance to change the plan.

Believe me, there are times, semblable,

when such rays are visible slanting through

our covenants and riders that a calendar

might just as well, for all the useless fear

it tries to ease with seasonal photos, be

that grove of birches, each benignly slashed to

individuality by no one, it depicts so earnestly.

You never know. You can’t. But you may trust

it fits together, boy, without a physical exam,

harmoniously, though all seems otherwise,

and no one has ever been denied. Call now.