Poetry

If this were the sea and not snow, morning- cold, Ohio, the slick, black trees standing for themselves along our ice creek, then these birds might seem ready for the flight. They’ve opened their massive wings, five, six feet across, and hold them to the cold sun as though cutting through salt winds unfettered. This…

xii. It was late May when I began the journal, a record of descents, tours of the abyss, & catalogues of blackness. One morning, I woke having dreamt I was the vehicle of aliens—no joke!—a stiff robotic self Impeccably designed to go out into our world & hunt other people. My alien Engineers had expected…

it was unusual to see children here, someone other       than a woman in a housecoat    (though it was afternoon it was after three)       or a retired officer of some sort at the apartmentsthat looked like a strip mall one was gladto have the boy and girlriding their bicycles       up and down the…

   1. Must everything be so—who are you—why bees—is this your beeping appendage—your sensation of alarm—shall I prostrate—what creed—why larynx—why sand, why a holy façade of face—why plinth and metalbone—what’s done—how does a dulcimer—what lament, what wrenching of will, why deposits into my head, why a direct line of sight over a hill— I do…

Her studious efforts to construct and maintain partitions as between varieties of touch, which appeared as the blur between affection and sexuality, were rigorous in proportion to the real absence of boundaries designated by these terms. While the contrast was not sharp, it was still painful. Like trying to pry physiology apart from feeling: once…

You with your equation, an arrow plugs your heart, half in half out makes nowhere at all. You won’t admit it but what’s left is time: a patient sponge to stop your arrow from bleeding. It isn’t more years I want, just some older days. If a day had four hours more I think I…

Up or down it, disguise and discretion go both ways. Indifferent to tone, peeling paint adds cachet: patina proudly worn as uniform. Varnish sweats like skin in the stair. Concierge behind lace curtains waits for deliverance. Who cares if care has stained her age? Even spring is autumnal: pallor of sun and leaf on café…

* We must retract our offerings, burnt as they are. We must recall our lines of verse like faulty tires. We must flay the curatoriat, invest our sackcloth, and enter the academy single file. Poetry has yet to emerge. The image is no substitute. The image is an anecdote in the mouth of a stillborn….

26. it cannot be got around because it is around, this possibility to be what we are what we were in the beginning with light etched in it . . . on the footpath promising passion, the tracery of its moments of summation like perfect timing. for as the former is bodiless become entrails in…