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  • The Weather Guy

    Hurricane This is scaring us, Hurricane That’s not far behind, And we’re not turning our backs one second. We look at the screen all day. We find Hurricane This still flapping away At the shirt of Tom the Weather Guy. Canada throws an arm around him. Hurricane That just bats an eye. Hurricane This is…

  • Dead Wood

    for Tom Lynch Huge glossy beetles doze in this room, each with a lifted wing-case the size of a car door. They are only fed once, then close themselves with a click. Too heavy to fly in their mahogany and oak, they have grown handles.

  • Gloomy Sonnet V

    There’s no such thing as a rich sex life. Sex is poor. But sex isn’t the only thing That’s poor. Black-eyed Susans and purple loosestrife For instance haven’t got a prayer. The ring She wears causes a certain Platonic sting Like bonsai trees, which make me claustrophobic. Seeing her without it could make the angels…

  • Lions Bible

    An 1804 edition in which 1 Kings 8:19 reads ‘But thy son that shall come forth out of thy lions’ instead of ‘loins’ Empires are my premise. Archilochos my schoolchair. More was my first word and that means Rome. Denotation is detonation, be careful. As car fuel: at home in the anger, at home on…

  • Emu of Wonder

    They took me to see the Emu of wonder eat out of a sack. They took me to see the Pronghorn pronking endlessly. They took me to see the White Hart at night, lit by headlights. I hiked to the top of the falls to see the Coho surrender. I heard the Pekinese suffering behind…

  • Early Man

    Leaves came and went as men warred over the shape of the table— peace would be talked in Paris, where Ho Chi Minh had been young once, hungry and hunted. Veteran of another war, my father wanted no squabbles at the supper table. What shape should it take to insure that we were out of…

  • Field Character

    Mothlike, he makes the swallow look slow, separating his flight-feathers as fingers, closing the trailing edge of his wings between beats, and his lyre-shaped tail, from his old, cupped nest of leaves to his later chosen, true, domed nest of reeds. Often he merges with bark of fallen log and insect-haunted least willow, the song…

  • Hailstorm

    An agony afoot, I burst into peacocks. Reverdy, all afternoon. Nothing is easy. It’s all broken nothing, ambiguous cold. In one poem a horse jumps over a hedge of sparks. The horseman is blue. And a bone or a flower is clouded with silence, everything engulfed in the peripheral. Somehow this produces in me pain,…