Poetry

Placed on the earth for this little moment I wake today to entertain the world. But, Lord, before first light only the clouds my answerer, even to no question, I stare outside, at the black broken universe I cannot see: trees, clouds, birds, stones, fence, grass— all the accouterments of worship on my eyes and…

“Like one man milking a billy goat another holding a sieve beneath it,” Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient. It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter. In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk. One morning finding pudding and a washed pot, another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser. After…

In college I loved Browning’s phrase— was it in “Two in the Campagna”?— “tangled ropes of lasagna” and even today I think it may have been pasta which civilized the Italians so much they refused to fight for Mussolini—remember how Marshall Badoglio’s armies surrendered in Africa tutti and rapidamente?—and even the names make you smile:…

Make room, said he to the haystack. The point is great; take that; your groom arrives. Lie back; spread grass; never a borrower be. Rakes groom, he said, fakes doom—though choosers don’t mind beggars. Said the haystack: It’s a wedding night, so I’ll keep one eye half shut. (Clothes do make the man, said the…

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…