Poetry

Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise but when she walks in her custom-size narrow bootsshe minces, or half-dances like a pony, the sort of pony who is dear and a little sillyand wears a hat with a ribbon. A little of this and a little of that—lacking a territorial integrity, she slides vertiginously…

I loved to walk down to the café where she workedand stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noirhalfway down the page. She’d come to my tablewith her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressedall in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell,strong and female, would enter me like a sword.When I used to…

The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts.No one hides a Tommy gun in its case.No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the namegift that came here, while Portuguese historians translatejumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If you have a cigar…

Even the gods misuse the unfolding blue. Even the gods misread the windflower’s nod toward sunlight as consent to consume.Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Still, you envy the horse that draws their chariot. The wilting mash of air alone keeps you from scaling Olympus with gifts of dead or dying things dangling…

Amped-up grid lights growl starsonto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace,car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’rebleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselvesfor being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugarfrom our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air,our guts, the gears chunking and purring, the stands…

is another thing Nietzsche saidthat hits me as pretty specious,if not entirely untrue,while sitting in my car in the Costcoparking lot, listening to the BalletMécanique of metal buggies shrieking as each super, singular, and self-containedwisdom of this Monday morning rumblesits jumbo packs of toilet paper and Diet Cokeup the sidewalk. So count me a Despiserof…

I shall speak of the tendency among sane and healthy persons to seeimages flash unaccountably into existence.                                                                                     —Francis Galton This is a tale not of science but of blue. Some say this heat is the worst in history, but history is huge and Idoubt it has never been hotter across the Northern peninsula. Still, the bears…

I’m resting on a bench in the cemeterywhile Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy traceover the slopes of grass, but we can’t stay long, since it’s a day I need to go into the city,and when I stand up suddenly my left leg’s half a footlower than my right, because I’ve stepped into the sunken, newly…

When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legsturning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A manwill come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleagueat an office party, or a lifeguard on a spit of sand—…