Poetry

Every once in a while, it’s true: I get sick of dying. Iambic ghosts choiring                                        their lovely, churchless songs, All the lines of the poem leaning toward terminus Like rows of low windbent weeds—    …

Alright, I’ll tell you the weirdo dream I had, but before I unwind that yarn, let’s twist our common thread. Like you, I stare plumb through the wall sometimes, because I’m thinking of a tree and a little tenant house beside it, and you-know-who on the stone step watching as I pretend I’m a butterfly…

What I see in one eye and not the other. A moon that slices away at the dark. The past and what’s coming. Unlike the little hunchbacked shrew hopping mindless across the road. Or crickets, eating anything in their path, gardens, grass, each other. We’re different. We anticipate. For the others, it’s the music without…

Will I always love you for throwing that skate out of Alan’s boat? Last summer, out lobstering in his Black Fin off Gay Head, only four bloody bluefish left for bait and five more traps to fill, we begged for its life. Did I know then I would leave you after fourteen years? Playfully patriarchal,…

Spackling the golden clouds in a fucking frenzy. I wear my hair mad as a rocket scientist that helpless one morning. Ill, doctor says, & she won’t live years. Did you ever run from your own sick heart choking? What the night knows in the myth of its far lightless pit could lay you flat…

In the end, the end seems probable, but before come many votes and murders.   The common redstart votes for its own splendor among the other splendid things;   the virgin murders her own abashed vocabulary, pretending to a toughness she does not as yet possess.   Possess she will, in time, a rude demeanor…

I felt it when they hammered out these feet and carved     the flesh between these long toes of mine and when they rubbed narrow the stalks of my legs     into calves and thighs—yes then and when they shaped my groin outward instead of in     and rounded my ass same as everyone’s yes—then…

If it isn’t a disappointment it’s an overwhelming number of coincidences. Because really I don’t need   another you another pigeon like you, I will tell them. You are at the same time an embraceable construction and of Kansan descent.   Nouns and nouns and metal and nouns and you might suffer the weather but…

This is the small hill Landscape of the middle country I love and I am on it stumbling down in high heels This is the last evening No light in the squandered wood The gentleman farmer still awake His back to my back   Verdant in blackness is a twinkling Is a wet streamlike thing…