Poetry

You drove all night through thunderstorms, the PA turnpike slick and narrow in the passes. The tractor-trailers roaring, and sleep whistling past your ears . . . My heart was where a hundred roads         converged & then moved on         At one point you drove under a mountain. Later the sun unfolded over the…

From here it looks like forgiveness, the possibility of a man: himself a meadow I traverse by sight, by feel, hand over hand across the green of him, eyelight by eyelight until I take him all in. Or is it just the front yard again, azaleas, hot pepper plants, and a stand of pampas grass…

Replace “snow” with “sparks” and see if the moral survives. Lie down and make a spark angel. Then replace “angel” with “angle” and see if morality survives. Our liberal society depends upon the difference of each flake and the capacity of the different flakes to form a drift. I looked down into my bowl of…

It started with my mother         using the walker to get from her bedside to the bathroom and me saying wow, and wonderful. It started one morning when my mother         looked in the mirror and asked: Who the fuck is that? Disgusted. It started with the medicines:         the ones that make her cheeks…

I agree with the central conclusion of all pop songs: you’re gorgeous and I’m angry. You walked into the party like the last thing you’d ever do was walk onto a yacht. In the hospital, I had time to consider the ever-so-slightly corrupt taste of your freshly cleaned armpits. I was always feverish to pry…

Kimber Lester, my student, while you cannot actually write a poem at least write a sentence to tell me why in the eighth stanza of this text the image of a bloody dagger hangs before me? The soufflé, my thought, has fallen. My own poem was lost on the plane from Finland. Under the hungry…

Since you ask: In the walls Of my country lie buried Patrons of the arts; In the floors are prisoners Who stole bread. The sky So close—or I am tall— I have to duck. My wide Cravats flutter In my face. I’m sorry, This is a love letter With a touch of a limp. I…

The world is not limited to literature. I was sitting in the Adirondack chair when it floated by. Mother and Father were on the other side of the lot building a wall out of small pleasantly shaped rocks. I came to them and said, “It’s in front of us,” the sun burning like an absence….

Now on this table a small bowl of salt, and I think of the lagoon, quiet at midnight, in moonlight, you in that doorway, your sarong a flare: if I needed you you were there, offering. The body is water and salt. A breathing sea. Why do we think we know better than the body?…