Poetry

  • from Holy Ghost People

    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…

  • Window on the Cape

    Boats in the front yard! Blue tarps enduring the stare of the winter sun hollow as clouds that have been emptied everywhere. Air flowing in defiance of Heraclitus, that you can breathe twice, and lose shingles from any direction. Bottles in the window sparkle with the names of defunct institutions and entrepreneurs. Purple and green…

  • Poem on Father’s Day

    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…

  • The Fly

    The fly knows when I give up waiting for him to land and go back to my book. Then when I am in the middle of a stanza or line he returns, and just before I am again aware of his air-brake touch, he has bitten me; I am jerked from the poem and the…

  • Psalm: Made by What

    Made by what I read    Slippage           To think             a fall broken                 as not a         stumble                         but a certain voice                     among the trees Listen              Listen            I am the ghost of undivided attention             I am     what Saul saw on the road near Damascus I am the ancient sigh pushed             out on the…

  • The Lion and The Gazelle

    Because the bullet was a dream before it was a bird. Because the bullet was a dream before it alighted in the child’s body while he looked at a pigeon wobbling through the air. Because the child has moved into photographs on mantels and the dreamer’s hands are folded in his lap and have not…