What light in the sky to leave, what flags through town, their white Q’s. How I was as I had been has nothing against captains, with distance between an awkward door & fence, in what appear to be the stars in a month in this string of deadly months. My movement upends,…
Boats in the front yard! Blue tarps enduring the stare of the winter sun hollow as clouds that have been emptied everywhere. Air flowing in defiance of Heraclitus, that you can breathe twice, and lose shingles from any direction. Bottles in the window sparkle with the names of defunct institutions and entrepreneurs. Purple and green…
not a woman’s eye not a man’s eye not the metal that hit what the eye caught Pain thinks of something without description & blank & luminous nothing of blue or gray or blue gray & the land & the sea without description not a shoe not a shirt not a string wound inside a…
There appears suddenly, out of nowhere, a blemish in the mirror on a piece of sentimental furniture, a bubble in the bevel of the scalloped border. Where are you now, my father, fifty-four years gone, whose adolescent face once looked back at itself from this mirror? (Father it wasn’t given me to know. Father…
to my great-grandmother and her only daughter, Jewell In times of survival, there are no decisions great or small—as a girl, my grandmother killed a copperhead with a broomstick, beating its pitted skull until her father’s dirt-damp floor shined bright as a penny. There was no money. The traps went empty. Listen: my…
The fly knows when I give up waiting for him to land and go back to my book. Then when I am in the middle of a stanza or line he returns, and just before I am again aware of his air-brake touch, he has bitten me; I am jerked from the poem and the…
Made by what I read Slippage To think a fall broken as not a stumble but a certain voice among the trees Listen Listen I am the ghost of undivided attention I am what Saul saw on the road near Damascus I am the ancient sigh pushed out on the…
Because the bullet was a dream before it was a bird. Because the bullet was a dream before it alighted in the child’s body while he looked at a pigeon wobbling through the air. Because the child has moved into photographs on mantels and the dreamer’s hands are folded in his lap and have not…
After Posidippus When my ship was wrecked on the rocks, and I died, Leophantos, a traveler, found me. Long on the road, he mourned by my side and wrapped a shawl around me. Alone by the sea he buried me and offered up his prayer. But I, too small to tell him of my…
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