Poetry

  • My Dear Ego, Be

    Clear, please, as a glass house.Ladled in plates, liquidform, silica, sand, dolomite, lime. Then be tempered, shaped, cranedtill you stand fastened to the forestfloor, reflecting. And if a sudden garden strutsup, risingin ribboned slope of pine and pin oak, laurel or fleabane, you can draw markersfor their names, it’s all yours, isn’t it, the bitsto…

  • Crossing Water

    In late summer I swim across the lake to the stand of reedswhich grows calmly in the foot-deep water on the other side. It is like going to a florist’s shopyou have to take your clothes off to get to, where nothing is for sale and nothing on displaybut some tall, vertical green spears, and…

  • The Complex Sentence

    The kind Italian driver of the bus to Romeinvited her to his house—she was obviouslyhungry—and gave her sandwichesand raped her. All those years ago—she smileswhile telling it—contemptuous,somehowof her younger self, who drags behind her like a can.Grammar is greatbut who will write the sentence that includesthe story of the damage to her soul and how…

  • Men

    We’re in the middle of it, in the middleof the backyard barbecuing steakand chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away,red and blue psychedelics, Coors Lightand breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea.Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once.A girl gorilla, a big one. I kept thinking,…

  • The Martyr’s Motel

    They’d traveled one by oneon their knees beneath the earthto be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motelin Ohio that heldthe reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these be the right martyrs?…

  • Douche-Bag Ode

    When I hear the young refer to someone as adouche bag, I want to say, You may havenever seen a douche bag. They were redrubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’dfill it and hang it high enoughso that gravity…I can’t go on,I see my mother’s douche bag, my poordouche-bag mom’s pathetic douche bag with itsclamps,…

  • You tell me

    And every morning the sun comes up. And the pretty coffee in a cup. And a bird meowing outside in a tree. And, on the ceiling, the water stain of England made sadder by singing in a minor key. The size of a coffin, and full of bees.Shadow on a tractor, mowing the field.The cat,…

  • Meeting a Stranger

    When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting.Your mother is there, and your father is there,and my mother and father, and what they might havethought of each other. And our people—back from ourfolks, back—are there, and what theymight have had to do with each other;if one of yours and one of…