On the terrazzo floor, I cupid-shuffle with a friend / who, when I was young, fed me mooncakes / while I spent mid-autumn, in-patient psychiatry, / just down Amsterdam Avenue, from where, / now, on your ashes, Langston, we dance.

Neither of us knew when we drove / through the South, collecting the lore / of the country folk, how hatred / can be audible in the song of love.

look this eyelash grows the tree / old as methuselah. the way the bristlecone pine turns in and in / makes your unborn daughter laugh.