Poetry

Halfway through the song I catch her, Irma Thomas and her band slowing down the heart in a 6/8 swing. How many quarters did I once pour like honey down the jukebox’s throat to make her sing again? That was Markey’s Bar. I found some peace there but can’t drink it back. This is California…

Today I plant sassafras and pickerel. Tomorrow, wild sarsaparilla and checkerberry. Will they take root here? The crows enter my yard. They remind me of ink slabs Chinese calligraphers used—not until mixed with water did their black ink breathe and broth. Each morning, goat hairbrush in hand, they sat near willows, against a dropping moon,…

I rode the Greyhound watching the twitchy things of the North give way to the sticky, bloodshot things of the South. No ground so burnt there’s not a church where I heard the Reverend Al Green amplify, rarefy, and glorify the word so that we were in some state of sweating July. The ashy black…

A whole lifetime in the middle, no wonder we crave and fear beginnings and ends. We want to see Highway 80 vanish into the Pacific waves, Tolstoy as a baby trying to hold a pencil. And this endless mess of photos, could that really be Grandfather dressed like a little girl, Mother with flowers in…

I’m tired, spent, really, but don’t say much, lean toward the rookeries, spirulina days, effect trooperish refrains, undelinquent and pressed, not hardy but persistent still, in a fading way, feel dunked, put upon, dry-hearted often in face of grief, bear trouble poorly, issue bulletins to the Dept of the Interior requesting stays and clarifications, sent…

These strollers here under the arcades, these anonymous passersby, how would you greet them if met at parties except in banter? “Are you vegetarian? Virgo? Rhesus? An alto? Mesomorphic? Melancholic? Here’s someone sanguine. Phlegmatic? Rheumatic? Optimist? You must be my- opic. Blotto? Sit down. A zero? Now, now.” But no, they walk past each other,…

The field believes profusely in its weeds. Who are we to intervene? Each evening lasts for days. We play whist and euchre on the porch. We practice sleeping without closing our eyes. Season of bing cherries and stained teeth, of unfenced cows lowing along the highway. And the river like a long dream, erasing its…

after J. Henri Fabre O scribe, miner, pedestrian tracing the page, try eating your house from the inside: fruit-house, dung-house, make it your task to bring forth flowers out of filth as you cage the syllable, force the cadence; grind and pace or mimic your betters under the argot surge— Observe this recluse scarab waxing…

A soup on the tray. The tray is heavy. The bowl and the spoon. The tray is heavy. A husband in the bed. The bed and the coughing. The bowl and the spoon, the tray and husband. At the window the snow a soup on the tray. The soup, it is heavy. The spoon and…