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A giant poplar shades the summer square. Breakfast shift done, Reem smooths her kinky mass of auburn curls, walks outside, her leaf-print dress green shadow on post-millennial bright air. It’s almost noon. I smell of sweat. I smell despite bain-moussant and deodorant, crumpled and aging , while recognizant of luck , to be, today, perennial…

How do you know? —Hardy, The Year’s Awakening Finch at my feeder, how do you know in muddy March to turn the first gold feather? By the light’s small increase, by the lesser night, the cell’s disturbance cold winter sleep awake? You do not know, nor I, why jonquils burn nor blood in Palestine—unwitting feather,…

Parked on the rock of the kitchen floor that the landlady put in herself, stone by stone, uneven, smooth, buttery, I talked—I guess loudly (it was a party, and there was wine) with a woman the color of wheat, even her eyelashes, and she was worried, she was saying, about the execution coming that morning…

I. In the absence of reliable ghosts I made aria, Coughing into emptiness, and it came A west wind from the plains with its arbitrary arsenal: Torn sails from the Ganga river, Bits of spurned silk, Strips of jute to be fashioned into lines, What words stake—sentence and make believe, A lyric summoning.   II….

We’ve prepared him so well for re-entry: His arms are stronger from pulling himself up on that triangle of stainless steel dangling above his bed at Walter Reed. His deltoids look defined, he works them when his wheel spokes flash dodging the physical therapist, the mouseshit, the black mold behind the door—      …

There is, indeed, no reason why Failure should not have its Plutarch…                                                                                      —Samuel Smiles What made you pull it from the shelf? The lettering on its spine rubbed off hundreds of hands ago. It could be anybody’s book now, as a skull could form the armature for Hitler’s cheek or Jesus’. Open it. No…

It isn’t dependable as a guide when it flows From a grudge against the body, but consider How helpful it proved in prompting the god Who revealed himself to the prophet Amos To gag when he sniffed the savor rising From temple altars. The smoke of sacrifice Stank in his nostrils when the fires were…

Here at El Paso airport I wait for Valentina who will take me to the other side to read poems like this one in Juárez Valentina is late soldiers are standing in line laughing teasing one another I was going to write: like hyenas about to smell their prey but I shouldn’t dehumanize them right?…