Poetry

Now I see it: a few years To play around while being Bossed around By the taller ones, the ones With the money And more muscle, however Tender or indifferent They might be at being Parents; then off to school And the years of struggle With authority while learning Violent gobs of things one didn’t…

So far the house still is standing. So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life. An almost readable language. Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country— you know that something important has happened, but not what.

There was a time when I watched it happen. Strangers pressed to other strangers in one bed, clothes on, air humid with the cloying scent of fruit juice and vodka: none of us giving in to another and yet unwilling to leave the scene of that possibility, pretending to sleep, actually sleeping. Then waking again…

             Swingmatism    |     You hear a bird sing, you don’t try to understand.                          Sissle    |     Listen to anything long enough it’ll tell you your life.                            Tiny    |     Pine siskin, dickcissel, longspur, purple finch, lark sparrow, wheatear, winter wren, waterthrush, veery.                Ornithology    |     Bird dream felt like fell from the nest, felt like…

1. High school fights were the worst, Young boys losing their teeth Against the chrome fenders of cars, Boys as they got thrown and then flew Then hit One kind of ground or another. There was always a second of nothing As the world came back to the boy, As the tooth loosed itself out,…

What is essential as breath reduced to a squabble about moral parity to hold a brief for the party that orders death. Moral parody: ours is but to cook, serve, clear, speak when spoken to. * We will not swell the glory chorus, slaughter calling to slaughter like lovers possessed. Nor will we turn away….

More than peace and cypresses, emboldened hares at the field’s edge, Father, I love gallantry, tenacity, the sanguine heart before the ledge: the artist questing and failing— the feet of bested Icarus plunging into the sea’s crest— the artist triumphing: a page of fire from the book of heroes. More than light-hooved gazelles, views from…

With my black pointed hood and my raggedy black gown, its tatters like the Wicked Witch might sport before she hops on her broom to write the sky in black smoke, Surrender Dorothy!—I could be holding out my hands for a trick or treat, like any American child on a Halloween eve, if not for…

It was in that year the dog arrived On the farm, and I appeared in his eyes, A speck because I was made of flesh, Not fur, not tail, not paws thick as leather. I bent down, patted his coat, And I asked, Is it time now? The old stray was reddish brown, His breathing…