Poetry

Boarding the local at Midtown, all seats taken, he worked his way through the car with firm lean arm from his black T-shirt pulling him down the high stainless-steel handrail. Through that forest of bodies flashed his teeth: in spasms his lips would pull back and his eyes rage, then calm. Neat, perhaps thirty, the…

How anyone is happy in this country I don’t know. Any way you turn there is an edge, and everyone cocks a wind-burned hand over the brow to look out under it. The water flings petticoats of foam against wolf-headed rocks, and multicolored boats moored among others to the weathered pier bob dumb as soldiers….

Oh I see—I have to see you fresh as those rough streams are as power is Caught—and wide awake Oh—we are past saving Aren’t odd books full of us What do you wake us for ——————————— Aren’t we the very same as we long ago saw and little by little thought of it Oh partly—not…

1. Hay What’s the Latin word for hayfield? Virgil’s mum in his instructive Georgics, though my neighbors talk of nothing but: how weeks of cool rain forced the upright grass— seed ready to burst from fuzzy heads too wet to cut, releasing to the wind goodness that should be stuffed above a stall, or pulled…

What matters is how you disagree with me, not the smooth surfaces of your appeasements. Let snow melt off the statues, parks come and go like seasons. See the park in snow see my hands rough from snow fingers red and stiff and remember the past when they begin to thaw filling with pain they…

Dispatched with a worn brush, the cursive writing of poet Xaian Shu possessed heroic spirit. His calligraphy’s balanced characters pointed to diligent study. Scholar, poet, Mi Fu’s idiosyncratic running characters wrote of living in peaceful times before the Mongols roared down from the north. His writing was described as a “sailboat in a gust of…

Kids in the Dumb Class weren’t allowed to enroll for French So instead we learned the difference between ser and estar. A yellow-haired midget father in a white suit cursed me for being In his family tent-yard, where I had wandered. He was my size. All a misunderstanding, we weren’t that stupid. I was earning…

Flying over many states, driving through many streets, I come to The Chapel in the Pines, where a film of your life shows our trunks bunched in at the crotch as we take turns burying each other in the sands of Far Rockaway, each standing by a mound, like archeologists discovering tombs, tombs of their…

How naughty to run the car with a hose             Returning the fumes             To the man in the car How lonely to sit in the fume-ridden car       Alone on a Wednesday morning How silly to end with your head in a bag             A white plastic bag             The end of your life How awful to get the…