I’ve filched some last gladiolas and canna lilies from the park to brighten things up with the fog overtaking the cliff and suggesting that everything floating above the occluded waves is just sea-dust, salt. . . . I place my flowers in a jug and gaze out into the guesswork where we might rise into untended fields of clouds, bright, durable blossoms of the cosmos. But nothing changes change. Didn't I go door to door in my sea-checked uniform shirt, collecting for

I. I started to learn what to ask for in the ranch land behind the back forty of a neighbor’s place among hidden oaks with burls the size of truck engines. I often got what I wanted growing up. Once, we’d made our bodies into a kind of bridge as if we were crossing over from ourselves— we had been found that way and glistening, we were halfway to somewhere, cosmos in our eyes, drunk with pleasure. And when my love got grounded, I went where the big trees of the valley dipped

long bands of snow scrunchies wrap thinning ribbons of road this morning driving to where I misremembered we were supposed to meet at 5am to run in 5 degrees, my whole face scuffed with cold later I forget the quizzes and rush back to my office for them, salting my heels on grimy ground clouds between buildings my own students tell me it’s martial not marshal as I am writing on the board I become thermally unstable, red rectangle glas

Artist's Statement: Collage is a trickster generating wayward juxtapositions. It scuffles with realism, challenges and expands it. As in prose poetry, which sometimes creates new worlds from shards of our actual one (notably, Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End, a frequent inspiration), collage delights in surprise, asks that one give welcome to the unexpected, allowing it to become, if briefly, a dazzling recruit to the ordinary life brigade. Against the sudden ubiquity of