Poetry

  • Abraham and Isaac: I

    He took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He added, “So shall your offspring be.” I have lived in tents and know how faint a trace we leave behind us on the earth; how, when the body fails, the soul folds its…

  • Blue Dementia

    In the days when a man would hold a swarm of words inside his belly, nestled against his spleen, singing. In the days of nightriders when life tongued a reed till blues & sorrow songs called out of the deep night: Another man done gone. Another man done gone.   In the days when one…

  • Paradise

    I.   The garden of Eden. Also called earthly p., to distinguish it from the heavenly p.                                                      First She is seventeen, he twenty-one. She is a green girl, Ophelic but believing Herself a witch-queen, while he plays Edmund, Bastard and natural. Sitting on the cliff’s edge, her Back to the village where floats down…

  • Once Strangers on a Train

    When the poles clatter past, the years fall away, a spider drops from the petals of a flower, space is ever more empty the larger it grows, the steel wheels chunk-chunk-chunk on the joints of the rails, the friction making sparks, stars crushed and invisible to us inside. There is a distance that diminishes as…

  • Playing House

    We shelter best that which destroys us. Language. Speaking to the other is like this:     standing on a small raft; baskets of apples to balance it;     a murder of crows downstream. There are no maps of the waters that cross through this house. A shut door does no good. Even pots with lids…

  • Santorini: Fragmentos

    Braced against the worst gusts yet this summer astride the promontory’s highest ridge,                         breathless we stare out across sea-glare                         into distance diaphanous as mist. * Wind-whirred grass buzzes our ankles here where temples rise bone-bright through blood worship with a view.                                           The present scatters roughly like whitecaps on a sea-face. * We…