Poetry

To my young daughter, I sing the songs my mother sang to me. Which is to say: to my young daughter,I sing an eclectic selection of breakup tunes of the 1960s. Now I knowyou’re not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name again,it’s all the same to me…That doesn’t…

since I couldn’t say tomorrowI said Wednesday since I couldn’t say Cleveland I saidOhio                since I couldn’t say hello I hung upsince I couldn’t say burger a waitress finishedmy sentence  a green-striped mint                 dissolved  on my tonguefrom peacock to dove since I couldn’t say my name                               I opened  as if preparing for a throatculture since…

Someone else died again,and when I heard, I feltthe green oceanlike a suffocating quiltpulled over me. I had a fatheronce with a heroinneedle in his arm. So what am Icapable of? I’d rather flipa book open than attend a party,feel my numbedfingertips in the cold and neveragain hear my sister’s voiceecho, “Joel killed himselflast night.”…

“Nature’s Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d’hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal…Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly?” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Don’t sit too close, the smellof her…

A brick warehouse, a cold morning,and Newark in the distance. Bleakis how I take my coffee, insidea shipping container while a planecranks by. Thinking something about “the bloom of youth” somethingI’ve lost something a manwould feel right saying but which sitsunder my tongue, unwanted pill. I do take the bitter train throughNew Jersey but this…

Remember the night it snowed               in a place we were told                               would never snow               and like two shadows cast by a lamp               standing in the presence                               of a Greater               we walked the beach the sand’s grit limpid               the expanse of what                               I didn’t know endlessly               swallowing the floes the ocean has always been               immutable and dumb                               has always carried on               past my limitations…

Laughing at the thought of lackof pleasure as a pleasure—monuments not yet objects,a waltz not for dancing but for labor— and having slogged through pollen,considerable weeds and fallenpower lines to be here, I have moreto say about this day than of the year. Blasphemy’s part of the Logos too,like wanting the light my way. Towersdisappear…

In the beginning, there was the lattice work of the body.You climbed me the way a cat… [wait, let me start over] In the lattice work of the body, we began.You climbed inside me. Fixed there like aneye in a socket. You saw everything:                        …