Ill Angels

Table of Contents 1 │Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen 2 │Reading Rilke in Early Autumn 3 │National Poetry Month, 2017 4 │National Anthem with Elegy and Talon 5 │Elegy with Drowned Sailor and Endless Horizon 6 │The Bronx Pyramid 7 │Stump Speech 8 │Kwansaba Suite from the Heaven of My Departed Poets 10│For My Creative Writing Students 11│Words for My Twelfth Grade English Class, After Reading Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” on Inauguration Day 2017 12│Reading a Single Line by Emily Dickinson on the Day My Father Died 13│Exodus 14│Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering 15│Einstein’s Sparrow 17│Solo 19│Fat Tuesday 20│While Listening to Coleman Hawkins’ “Picasso,” I Remember My Mother as a Young Woman and I Imagine My Wife in Her Old Age 22│The Mayfly’s Complaint to the Holy Family 23│Sometimes When I’m Listening to Thelonious Monk 24│Channeling Sonny Rollins 25│Anthem for Paisley Park 26│Outlaw Country 27│While Listening to Dolly Parton Sing “Lover’s Return,” I Imagine the Girl in You Talking to the Boy in Me 28│Louisiana Hayride Shivaree 29│While Listening to Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me,” I Imagine Our Marriage a Montage in a Coen Brothers Film 30│ Brief Instructions for Drawing a Portrait of My Wife after the Most Violent Week in Recent U.S. History 31│Portrait of My Wife Listening to Nina Simone 32│Portrait of My Wife as a 90s Mixtape 34│Endless Duende 35│Brass Band Epithalamion 36│Channeling Satchmo 37│Love Poem Written While Listening to “Alligator Crawl” Repeatedly and Misremembering Lines from Kobayashi Issa 38│Epithalamion with References to Philip K. Dick, Paul Klee, and Gene Roddenberry 39│Brief Instructions for Drawing a Self-Portrait While Listening to John Coltrane 40│Dante 42│O Trampling Empire 43│Gerard Manley Hopkins Versus the Wu-Tang 44│Wear Black, Drink Water, Nourish a Fierce Zeal with Locusts and Wild Honey 45│I Am Your High School Love Poem Come Back 46│Reading William Carlos Williams in My Early Twenties 47│Reading William Carlos Williams in My Late Thirties 48│The Porcupine Climbing the Apple Tree 49│Wilding Orchards 50│American Pastoral with Warped Floorboards 51│Verrückt 52│The Greening of Harriet Tubman 53│And Why This Ridiculous Happiness? 54│Elegy for Liu Xiaobo 55│My Goddaughter Chews Happiness 56│Jubilate Pluto 57│Self-Portrait Illuminating the Initial ‘D’ 58│Preamble 59│The 45th 60│The Sorrowful Mysteries 61│Words for My Wife, After Reading Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook” on Our Anniversary 62│Curriculum Vitae 63│Reading Gwendolyn Brooks to Tenth Graders 64│Sunny 65│Reading Langston Hughes to Our Unborn Child 66│Explaining A Love Supreme to My Unborn Daughter 67│Words for My Unborn Daughter Written After Removing a Briar Patch from My Front Yard and Beginning with a Misremembered Line from a David Ignatow Poem