Poetry

I wander down rows of plastic magic—glowing       The boy comes home to a house too full of skulls and x-ray specs squeezed in next to sneeze dust       decoupage and dead dreams, his mother nearly adrift in genie bottles, fake ice where flies swim frozen,       on the dhurrie beige couch, worn down with being arrested, ruled…

1. My sea-blue father Left me Heart-burst Broke as a dune does Not glass, no cracks A surge of softness Slid down my throat To stifle, for good, Unendingness. 2. My own me was haunted by a shovel That chased me through the trees. It called Hurry home to Mummy And her theater of the…

Boarding the local at Midtown, all seats taken, he worked his way through the car with firm lean arm from his black T-shirt pulling him down the high stainless-steel handrail. Through that forest of bodies flashed his teeth: in spasms his lips would pull back and his eyes rage, then calm. Neat, perhaps thirty, the…

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…