Poetry

Everybody has their mean days. You live in a light blue turtleneck, park dirt, roller skate patch, little monkey in a shirt. The busted-up driveway. Triumphant soap music from the window and there down the road a bowlegged grandpa who wants to help with your project. You sit on the tailgate and watch, bored, poking…

from the world that called you Piñon not one voice is now not stopped Piñon little pine nut sweet seed of the pine tree which is evergreen Soul that discovered itself as it discovered the irreparable breaking through ice to touch the rushing stream whose skin breaking allowed darkness to swallow blondhaired Ramona in 1944…

The stick the dog drags writes a poem in the snow along the railroad tracks. Is it my life she’s writing in a long, slow cursive already half-buried by fresh snow? There, written in a winter forest, lies my story, for anyone to read.

De Español y de India Produce Mestizo —after a series of Casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, ca. 1715 The canvas is a leaden sky     behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing     an equation of blood— this plus this equals this—as if     a contract with nature, or a museum label,    …

Or a gauze that only measures a wound. Or a path of frozen ruts, mocking escape. What remains is a distraction, the ratio of exhibitionism to buoyancy. Which loses its shape first? Lung smoke? Stocking?

after Cavafy   Flickering above the pink rosettes and your name iced in ivory buttercream, a bouquet burns on top of your cake, fifty blossoms of flame. One candle equals a year of your life, plus one more to wish on. Hurry, make a wish, blow them out! They’re out. Now cut the cake. But…

Ach—the gravitas of the hunt. I. Digestive turned blue so the woman said. Said, I write my own islands, and red, red. Was urinary.            Under the astigmatic lens of her naked eye she followed the tracts. Looking at worms for a long time she said A worm in its lifetime moves short distances. She knew…

Some name them knees, those roots of the cypress trees in that murky swamp, rising up out of the water, though their legs beneath them, the feet, the toes, even the bodies down there at the mud’s bottom still haven’t shown up yet. So far, it’s only those bold knees that point the way. Some…

Thus what we’ve learned is that our greatest poets were death-obsessed loners who seldom enjoyed the pleasures of lovers despite living in a constant state of sexual excitation. They started as revolutionaries and atheists, or they went to Harvard and voted Republican and mowed the yard. The night sky was starry and told them stories….