Poetry

It could come right now as a dit-dah of rain,     mere pine needle lost in a tree-stack of beads,        thorn expelled from red dot, print felt            an inch from a finger, pursed lips speaking in tears. It makes you look dotty. Easily amused. It starts     like a Spanish ¡—down on your…

translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak I misbehaved in the cosmos yesterday, a day and night without a single question, surprised by nothing. I performed my ordinary chores, as if nothing more were required. Inhale, exhale, step by step, tasks and errands, and not a single thought beyond setting out and getting home again….

Federal holding cell, Hughes County jail Fights. Never quiet—like years back with the folks, but ratcheted-up, bloodied, multiplied, till the badge writes the last two shovers up, says he’ll do the same for all of us if we can’t keep the crybabies smothered I WANT SOME PEACE, SLEEP, NO MORE GETTING OUT OF THE CHAIR,…

after Rilke It’s time, Lord. The summer was so immense. Now on the sundials your shadows stretch their lengths And across the meadows you release the winds. Command the last fruits to swell with life, Grant them still a few days of florid sun, Press them to completion, and like a hunter Chase the fleeting…

There’s mercy in the decades as they pass, reducing years of ache to a single afternoon beneath a cherry tree in a terraced garden: the cherries seem to ripen while we gaze, darkening as sunlight starts to fade. You’re talking; I’m waiting for you to realize what you won’t admit for another decade: love is…

The argument begins. One voice is overcoming another because it’s had it, it’s had enough of all this shit and, unaccompanied, rises to the edge of screaming and past it till the column of air in that throat has nearly abandoned everything under it. Only the vault of the forehead and the bridge of the…

This is my father bent like a Michelangelo prophet over a tray of spore, showing me how to pour boiling water over the soil to eradicate fungi, etc. I stand beside him ignoring his lecture. Instead watch steam from his coffee cup curl into the blue of the tubular daylight bulbs. This is my brother…

I like to say. I must like to; I say it all the time, leaving parties early, acting put-upon. My little boy sucks blood out of my social life, friendships draining like my hopes to pitch for the Yankees, or find important fossils in my yard. Still, I love knowing my son won’t let sleep’s…

Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…