Poetry

Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…

When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…

May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…

When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field. “Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I…

Wine festered—a thorn at the bottom of my skull. Wind blew all the night’s big ideas off the trees. The moon had frostbite. The stars did, too. Be kind to animals was my mother’s mantra. Do your duty was my father’s. Ghosts breathed on my rearview mirror as I drove downtown. On black ice glistening…

—not in knowledge, but in calm; not in indifference, but nearly. Under bullying fog the white houses stand with effort on the coast, the tides teasing the scrub blue, the land beneath hassled by waves, drowning in salt-wine. The lichen, as scalloped and ridged as the cliffs, breathes red and gold; its smell, like the…

I’m a pea farmer. There’s a stream out back. I like the sound of it. One day out of the week, I bring home a string of brown trout and slap them down on the kitchen table. The fish god provides. If someone knocks on my door rather than stroll in, I don’t like it….

A swirl of leaves tosses its bag of colors over the shoulder of an unmarked road. In the century- old barn where the leaves take refuge, the wind is a permanent resident rehearsing the music of abandonment. And in this hollow the leaves— who found each other before they got lost and braided—are endlessly tweaking…

The minute I feel the urgent glow Quick in the black you’re smiling Up at what I have no right to call A harvest moon (that’s not code). Let me ask you for something, A good shoulder-pounding and the tub’s Aromatic salts, a cigar is just No justice, no peace. October Crushes your soft lip….