Poetry

In the B movie of our lives, there are no panoramas; our limitations have perfected the close-up. Pain is confined to what is visible: slump of the left shoulder, elbow on the table. There’s only room for subplot this side of the proverbial tracks. Sound of vengeance like a passing train, sweet and noble journey…

How many hours did I lie in bed, thought stapling my sixteen-year-old arms to the sheets, thought’s curare, when I finally dialed Tami Jamison, numbing my lips too much to speak? How often did I think, “I’m dead,” feeling my strength leak away, phlegm drown my lungs, sarcomas thrust like red toads up out of…

My father rises each morning to the fourteen varieties of banana trees he’s cultivated with unrivaled care, each tree casting shade across our lawn, each racimo an offering my father hacks with his machete, a small cruelty he performs like a doctor circumcising a newborn, though I like to think he is unburdening these trees,…

We undress shy as a gun. * The mailman’s son, I am nor snow, nor night, nor gloom. * Her eyelashes long & false as an alarm. * He say, she say, foreplay, amscray. * Her cocktail dress pours over my bare floor. * Her feather boa hissing yes. * Without her I am incomplete—…

Cobras rise out of raw pits for them, coils swaying below each diamond head and red forked tongue. When in old robes they walk across a bed of sin, steam hisses as if each footstep held a pod of water and to the murmurs of the crowd, they lift their feet unscathed, and grin. And…

I am translating the world into mockingbird, into blue jay,     into cat-bombing avian obbligato, because I want more noise, more bells, more senseless tintinnabulation,     more crow, thunder, squawk, more bird song, more Beethoven, more philharmonic mash notes to the gods.     I am translating the world into onyx, into Abyssinian, into pale-blue Visigoth…

Of Memory I. Messala Corvinus forgot his own name  II. One, by a blow with a stone, forgot all his learning. Another, by a fall from a horse, forgot his mother’s name and kinfolk. A young student of Montpellier, by a wound, lost his memory, so that he was fain to be taught the letters…

Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat     There’s a poem I’m always trying to write. It always begins the same way.     Oh, listen, listen—     It is the urgency of the words that compels me. I know what the poem is about, it’s about the world and its shining. But what comes after these words is…

I: I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who’s a faggot like you. In the empty parking lot of St. Jude’s Church in Westchester, on a summer day, she lets go and falls to the gritty pavement while I pedal and pedal and glide without training wheels for the first time….