Jill Allyn Rosser

One can't help admiring
their rickety grace

and old-world feathers
like seasoned boardwalk planks.
...

To say screw them, to be screw-them
bent on one thing all but lost,
one music or mystery,
beyond all the necessary
...

How do you explain why elephants
appear to move their unwieldy hulks
with greater dignity than most humans do
in their finest moments,
...

They come down to us
rounding the corners of centuries
at an innocent jog, shedding letters
and most of the grand old meanings
...

When the fog slunk in with that salivary,
close, coyote panting, its hue a very
huelessness, like breath huffed on a glass,
like the void stretched and still stretching past
...

From the point of view of all time,
these recent changes signal
more a return to nature
than a departure, than degradation.
...

Roadlight licks the night ahead, licks
the white line on night's new hide, licks
the undulating blacktop flat, sticks its end-
less forking tongue out onward, flicks
...

Once again you've fallen for the lure
of his deferral, his quick eyes' brightness
slinking from the pantry of the righteous.
Nothing half so sleek as self-licked fur.
...

The afternoon slows down, the town in steady rain.
That one with the trendy chicken-plucked look—
hair a tufted circle on top, the rest shaved all around—
I can't really care about. Of course I hope
...

Go home. It's never what you think it is,
The kiss, the diamond, the slamdance pulse in the wrist.
Nothing is true, my dear, not even this
...

joy in the day's being done, however
clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists,
the packages nestling together,
no one home waiting for dinner, for
...

we all got tickets to The Truth
finally we thought finally
when the curtain fell away
our indrawn breaths could be heard
...