Poetry

To live without memory is to have each hour as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window to paint: amber-honey cold mornings: humbled by evening:: variation and variation of ambiguous figments—ziggurat beehive auroras—flicker and go out. All history may as well be in these brushstrokes: the hand has not rested…

Here in North America we do not experience an atmosphere of butterflies. They do not fill the air with such camaraderie that the hills burn orange and yellow with filtering wings. So on Christmas morning I offer him the old camera back— the Leica with the fancy zoom lens. His fingers quiver whitely as he…

Outside a deconsecrated church turned nightclub on Sixth Avenue remains a thriving patch of moss, green as spring even in winter. Tucked along the edge of the foundation, it renews itself imperceptibly beneath our eyes, proof that people and their constructions change more quickly than plants and less predictably. We gather and disperse under this…

When he is deep inside me suddenly I see what he is doing: he is like a man in a tunnel clay walls moist, tracks gliding into the distance he carries a weak flashlight peers forward What is he doing? Is he afraid of snakes? No, he is seeking the other man the rival, the…

It is not the fall of Nineveh. Not the sliding of the earth, the clashing of the icy stars. Nothing as bad as that. It is the silence, now, of a little black cat. The bowl where he ate. The chair where he sat. He’s curled in a ball on the laundry basket. The cat-nip…

The soldier plant is perverse. Common to civilizations, it is like nothing else in Nature. Blown down upon the richest earth, its seeds will not root: nourished by blood and tears, they will not ripen; even prayed over, celebrated in myth, imagined as history, tended to a fault, they never flower.

Scawmy, gray-souled November blinds the whale-road, pall draper over this ship bearing one whose name means of the ocean in a language he denied allegiance to, though his lines rang with cynghanedd—English reined by Celtic music, stitched tight as the coracle that wombed Taliesin—tribal rain-downs of sound, not enough: a small people lose their tongue…

He has bribed the thorns to guard his poppies. They intoxicate the valley with their forbidden scent, reddening the horizon till it is almost as if they aren’t there. Maybe the guns guard only the notorious dreams in his head. The weather is kind to every bloom, & the fat greenish bulbs form a galaxy…

I was twenty-two, pretty maybe. It was a small town county fair: hot dogs, freak show, cotton candy, and heavy wheels laden with light, all tuned to the gaudy air. The Octopus—remember that one? Eight arms like extended girders, the thing was a metal Shiva juggling worlds: a cup spun at the end of each…