Poetry

after Gordon Matta-Clark a house is what gives way the living unframed behind the door (don’t answer) iron bedstead shadowed (here we’d hide to play) never comes around the head so crack the rafter (the hand, the face) tilt it true lay open the beam four corners forced (where you were) undone the bright core…

In the dark field, The question is the same. Desiring to sit and not sit In one place. And write nothing about smoke, Flaring birds with diaphanous wings, A crow’s intent, how slow the elderly Beneath spangled trees—how thoughtful their retreat. One bottomless pot. But I can’t keep Roethke out of my thoughts, Tu Fu…

Automobiles rout the Eternal City, their exhaust peeling like slow acid the skin and cartilage off statues, slipping the spirit from its moorings, as a million times a day, humans stand, backs pressed to the wall in the narrow streets, to let cars pass. One step, two, sometimes maybe even a string of uninterrupted steps,…

“I think you think I don’t know who you are,” she says at the window, “but I know what I know.” She sits across her tiny, white, bizarre, and sterile room, watching the falling snow. He stares at the half-done puzzle on the floor: Escher’s Waterfall, just more confusions for someone seldom coherent anymore, being…

In the same week that John F. Kennedy, Jr., with wife Caroline and her sister Lauren, crashed his private plane into the sea, a Kentuckian who worked for Tyson Foods— which gave big money to President Bill Clinton, who led the mourning for JFK, Jr.—fell into, not a vat, vat sounds undignified, like in that…

Here I am, confronting this bowl kept under guard and pressurized glass in the archway of the St. Louis Art Museum, and somehow it feels good to note that it’s not all that impressive. Clean, sure, and smooth, but plain. Like this was just the demonstration piece by the teacher of a pottery class who…

I don’t believe in ghosts though I’ve seen milk-steam wandering a darkened room. I don’t believe a big mind regards all sparrows though I admire the faithful, how crossing a street or a continent of trouble they seem confident and frank as stars. Cranky and cratered, I maneuver like a moon of bright remarks. In…

I hear a generator buzz, I taste those days, citronella swirled with cardboard meals and ice unlimited, and the welcome thrill of Katrina’s king cake dolls, half-ounce bottles of Tabasco packed with MREs marked “Chicken Fajitas.” People thought our food was special made, a little heat singing to the tongue of home, but I knew…

We’ll never know for sure now, you in your garage with the motor on and the tailpipe clogged and the door closed, three days before the trial. Your wife found you after she found the note, and this morning the numinous beauty of low fog in our field has taken on a strange gloom, a…