Beginning in the midst of things that split or burn or tear the skin with happenstance, this elegant, unkempt earth of rust and dust, smashed cat and armadillo roadkill, abandoned pickup trucks blocking the berm. A fine scum of rumor and pine pollen coats cars and sidewalks, spring’s clumsy fingers smear the seen with allergens:…
I’ve come home, to sit inside this house among the locusts and the crickets, their goodbye duet, their chitter and squeak of So long. Packing his things to make room for my own: his pale blue Easter suit, his Bowie knife, its leather sheath branded with Nashville. Catholic medals, a finger’s length statue of Christ…
Perhaps someone was watching a mud turtle or an armadillo skulk along an old interminable footpath, armored against sworn enemies, & then that someone shaped a model, nothing but the mock-up of a hunch into a halved, rounded, carved-out globe of wood covered with animal skin. How many battles were fought before bronze meant shield…
I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin. With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap, I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet of moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts. With the new…
Sing for us whose troubles are troubles we’re lucky to have: cold orange juice, and cold coffee, corridor after corridor, as our circadian rhythms fall into place: work is a refuge from home, and home from work. We have task force reports, but no tasks, and no force, so far removed from concrete and crisp…
Fifty-six years ago I picked up a musical instrument for the first time with intent to commit jazz. It was a trombone left behind by another kid at the jazz record store where we both hung out. (He’d been snatched by Selective Service for the Korean War. I’d 4-F’ed out.) I got a single lesson…
I can"t say: sweat, and then skin, and then mom, and then speak. No such thing as a sentence, it seems. No such thing as what’s happening. Moth under the covers, get out. Brown wings, hung on the lamp stand. If the soul lives in memories then the soul is no matter to reckon …
Nicole has this one friend whose hand can burn straight through her clothes & through the skin of her back. Like this, she said, placing her hand on my winter coat, the train above the East River, stalled. Like this, the canary blossoms of Chinese witch hazel flame into this world as astronomers believe dark…
Here, on the boulevard of run- amuck dreams, each stamped with a doll-like face you half- recognize as yours, the neon displays its chilly, self- possessed light. But the lips on the billboards are raspberry cream. They say Buy me or Be me, you can’t tell. You’re confused like mad again, in this night of…
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