Poetry

  • The Little I

    Hammer out of the cage the movie insists: banged blonde, blocked highway the gorilla helps wreck—look, Ma, no cloverleaf. The chaste scene. The woman born from the thigh she is holding, the one eye of the truck that becomes worry. I’m not the Lithuanian accenting Every threat, I’m not even the foliage that spends itself…

  • Leaning In

    Students all too commonly misconstrue the poem in which Sappho calls that man equal to a god, who, opposite you, leans in and        whispers, etcetera, tending to assume it’s about two people: speaker/loved one? Beloved and man near her, bending close to her, whom the poet hears as,        heads close together, they laugh softly? Wait:…

  • November

    I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… —Robinson Jeffers   The squirrels are up to their nuts in pecans, And the largesse of the trees Has made them careless in their comings and goings, Their carryings and buryings. Every few blocks there’s one Who zigged just when he should have zagged;…

  • Fan

    Little engine of barbed wire and autobody, miscellaneous tunes drifting on the thinner. Crystal Dry Ice when the wires weigh down, snap in the snow and the refrigerator dies. Not today, a day born hot, men pouring tar on the grocery store roof before the worst of it arrives, you in a hammock, book in…

  • Days Like Survival

    Beginning in the midst of things that split or burn or tear the skin with happenstance, this elegant, unkempt earth of rust and dust, smashed cat and armadillo roadkill, abandoned pickup trucks blocking the berm. A fine scum of rumor and pine pollen coats cars and sidewalks, spring’s clumsy fingers smear the seen with allergens:…

  • That Winter

    In the hundred days I lived in a trailer in Ithaca, New York, I thought unceasingly of that other Ithaca, wine-dark, beset, a place from which to start from, maybe to come home to in some eventuality undreamed of. I cleaned factories for a guy named Ben who wanted to make movies and whom I…

  • Between Ice and Water

    Accept it. There will never be anything else Except this here. April snowstorm Sweeps away the filaments of smoke, and then The sun appears and melting ice Drop by drop trickles from stiff cables. Let’s avoid misunderstanding Stammer out this rapture together with sorrow Between ice and water, in the hazy Spring light when drain…