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Life’s What You Make It

Ed is retired. Lucky Ed. He sits around and drinks his beer. He snores. There’s nothing in his head. Ed is retired. Lucky Ed, his wife thinks. I’ll go out instead of killing him if I stay here. Ed is retired. Lucky Ed. The TV blares. He drinks his beer. Sid is a workaholic. He…

Your First Motherless Day

Your first motherless day found you in the pines photographing pink legs of an elusive hermit thrush you tracked by ear to a twig that didn’t tip, so empty were the hollow bones at the marrow of song. The phone pealing at home startled your dog awake. It rang and rang, territorial. The hours you…

Objects of Affection

Each summer when I’m in Krakow, I make weekly trips to a flea market close to our apartment. This particular market also sells antiques, but it doesn’t aspire to a loftier name, because it also peddles secondhand books, last year’s issues of fashion magazines, handmade jewelry, items that aren’t old in the sense that antiques…

The Thing’s Impossible

Perhaps the single feature of the villanelle that twentieth-century poets made their own is the absence of narrative possibility… the form refuses to tell a story…                 —The Making of a Poem Don’t write a villanelle to tell a tale: they’re not the form for narrative or plot. It’s pretty obvious why…

Margin of Error

My Pom’s 15, a centenarian dog, but that’s nothing to a tortoise. And next to a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert, oldest living protoplasm on earth, it’s a breath. And earth’s history, compared to the universe, an hour of yogic breathing. Such a tiny fraction, so little between .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 and zero, my…

Octopus

There is nothing for her to hold and everybody knows it. Nothing for her to hold, eight times over. Pieces of her babies, girly, ghostly, float toward her nightly tossing brain. Mom has a gene for dropping dead, but she won’t use it on her misery. God of Anthony, god of the thin good men…

My Philadelphia

Philadelphia can be called thicker— home of W. C. Fields and Governor Rendell. I’ve been flying barrier islands and the Jersey Shore stretching to land in this place with some shoulders and other padding. Has Philly sold out its paranoia? No, it stayed thick, a thick knee, a thick elbow, thick ribs, thick toes, thick…

Out Far Enough

For sorrow we have love and the waves dying in.? We can visit our lives in the country of winter trees and blue ruin. ?For the nameless we have silence.? Where tenderness runs out there is tenderness.? A trail descends into the next glen.? Our anti-muse’s hair is the color of loam.? For gospel she…

Sunflower

Wind takes your hair like a hooligan owl and leaves a deep pocket of dusk in your scalp. Love without pride is a love with no end. You keep calling me in to fill up your head, but the mutinous dust of the dead yellow field says better not listen to a thing with a…