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Moby-Dick is not about Moby-Dick. Not really. The white whale makes his appearance, of course. We have been promised that much. Moby-Dick emerges, finally, at the end of Melville’s great novel, in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.

Days later, not long after we left the convent,
the war ended. I promised to take her directly
to the train station, but the sight of her
on the back seat scrambling out of that uniform,

The more they’ve been shrinking, the bigger it’s been getting, though maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. The world’s great coral reefs, that is, and in particular Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, on the one hand—and, on the other, the...

The workers specialize according to their age.
At first they feed the queen her royal jelly
and then they nurse the larvae in their combs.

A yacht lies down
in my window, on the harbour
the dusk has come.

Rick Trundy does not like staying ashore, even when the wind is blowing twenty knots. It’s 4:30 in the morning in mid-April, early in the lobster season, and while most of the lobstermen in Stonington, Maine, are someplace warm, drinking...

I breathe the leaves of the basil
It has news for me—
For all my senses

My grandfather’s right eye was a frozen slab
of milk-white ice that light never thawed
and when he slept, the lid didn’t drown
the curse of its constant stare.

did it come in the bark of a dog
in the eucalypt air,

the marsupial faces tilted, listening,
or the ghostly skin and the foreign hair,

There are those that in the distance seem a swarm of gnats
those that with their barking try to rally us in a campaign against the stars
those that torment their prey