His barely recognizable corpse had gone through the passage rites of propriety, the grandiloquence of motionlessness.

I prowled up and down the rows of the hospital bookstore with a fevered intensity; “fevered” because it was a hospital, “intensity” because I was perplexed by the mysteriously ruptured tendon in the middle finger of my right hand

There’s the country somewhere outside the car.
The country where the elm fucks the maple
and the elm broods as if auditioning
for a new PBS miniseries.