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Limited, the body’s vocabulary               cannot always say        what it feels, what it wants, what             it is.                     Unendurable,                                          this voicescrape, a song bird                              lashed to my throat—                                                                Where can I escape                                                      from thy spirit?                                            Where can I flee from…

Don’t get up, don’t give me that talk about I’m sorry and Look at the woods how beautiful the woods are when the snow flits through those holes I punched in the treetops, said God.                 God said, I don’t care if your knees get muddy, I don’t care if your dinner burns,                        …

To the shadow house where the bees look like birds, and an ant’s death on the pavement hums the world beneath. Stamp on the silvery air. Ghosts buck back against their own pressure. What prods at the jaw there? A convergence of birds in a dripping glade? A string of gulls dragging in a hex?…

not a woman’s eye not a man’s eye not the metal that hit what the eye caught Pain thinks of something without description & blank & luminous nothing of blue or gray or blue gray & the land & the sea without description not a shoe not a shirt not a string wound inside a…

What light in the sky to leave, what flags through town, their white Q’s. How I was   as I had been has nothing against captains, with distance between an awkward door   & fence, in what appear to be the stars in a month in this string of deadly months.   My movement upends,…

To finally locate you after all these years and then— it’s in a dream!: you’re near the end in a hospital in a small New England city, what monstrous snake of a road led you here, where you sit on the bed making calls as you did, to the rich and famous, trying to raise…

to my great-grandmother and her only daughter, Jewell In times of survival, there are no decisions     great or small—as a girl, my grandmother killed a copperhead with a broomstick, beating its pitted skull until her father’s dirt-damp floor shined bright as a penny. There was no money. The traps went empty. Listen:     my…

There appears suddenly, out of nowhere, a blemish in the mirror on a piece of sentimental furniture, a bubble in the bevel of the scalloped border.   Where are you now, my father, fifty-four years gone, whose adolescent face once looked back at itself from this mirror? (Father it wasn’t given me to know. Father…

mistranslation after “Fellah” by Taha Muhammad Ali   You: Beethoven I mean to say: Mr. Beethoven I don’t get it: I spend the day removing obstacles, Me and all my neighbors, we’ve covered all the bases But behind our backs, on the phone, the sun still going up and down There are those who hurt…