Poetry

All winter the ghosts were waitingfor a new high-school teacher who refused to appear, and so youwere roped in. February had the year on pause, the dayslike holes that tripped you over and over in the frozen yard. You hadno knowledge of history or chemistry yet were expected to teachthe dead from a colorful textbook,…

to Sleep I’ll count backward from a thousandtill my teeth begin to grind, down to zero, where the digits tilt and swivelin a ring around the racing eye of the tornado I’m made of tonight.Left alive, I am an opening too wide, much too much gaping skyto slip behind the throbbing canopy of hide I…

My hair was not on fire and the fabric of my shirt didn’t rub me the wrong way.It was the best day of my life when I entered the monastery. My heart was not on firebut enclosed by a high walland covered with new grasses for the white cow who hadtaken up residence there. Each…

I walk uptown with a letter in my head, past the piers and thelanguishing seals, the spiral of a spring day, landmark, harbor, inletand bay; the ocean into more ocean, the gray of a gray sky. Dear God.Dear Absentee Landlord Who Collects the Checks. Dear BarbershopGlass and Barbicide Blue. Dear Recession and War and Empire…

Let the light beyellow but not enough to stingthe eye, close enough to turnoff morning candle-lit, quiet,incandescent, enough to seebeside, clear after morning,to burn on not cold yetnot quite bright enough to readby, and just near absentmindedlyeach night

In this borrowed house I keep my doors unlocked. A day in the middleof days where if not for worry I’d be alone. I’m cold as vodka. I dressmyself back to warmth. Two dogs curl asleep downstairs. One gets upto align an invisible orbit then falls, graceless thud against hardwood.O marriage of longing to action!…

Greet the walker, walkingin with the shadow of the hood shooing away the emphatic light.First cold night the blinds flicker down, each vinyl stripa white notion near as wide. August, gone, feels gone.The woman in another room, ever without honeymoon,hits snooze and spreads her hair behind her like the patchof hillside shade I’ve come to…

Sundays my sister Mary and I’d splitbags of penny candy in the junkyardafter raiding each room of our trailerfor loose change and Pepsi cans.Climbing through the interiorsof gutted clunkers, we declaredtruces that wouldn’t last the day.Our lips puckered from flavors—sour patch, lemonhead, warhead,airhead, sour belt, jawbreaker—that named the failings of our mother’s men.We suffered them…

A blackish hueclustered at our heels. You were in the mixed woodswhich meant I was in the same mixed woods. I kicked up the floor. Needleslittered the lower air in standing dust, our shadows dotting the dirt moundsloped unnecessarily away. I peeled backin drying nut husks, upturned trunks of living trees,massive, deeply split. A bird…