Poetry

We play this same game at the end of every day, which you love as much as I: I have you in a gentle headlock, I’m hard against you, my mouth, my breath a graze from your ear— but I’m not talking to your ear, I’m pouring pictures direct to your tender brain: I will…

if this is insecurity, call it, then, the nature of arrogance if you stare at any photograph long enough, it will begin to flutter, & eyes inside will nearly wink there are only two ways of reading this, & i have already forgotten the second one every time i ride a bus from one city…

When I was riddled with pizzazz and hot to trot, gnats and mosquitoes didn’t bother me, but now I’m past the middle of that carrying on, so long immunity. Bugs bite parts once sleek as that trickster snake, and still fair, the blush of apples, where curves quiver. So says the mower in our garden….

In the Swedish film, an island community. And the island grows smaller, it seems, as the bodies of animals are discovered, broken, littering the tidy, hushed landscape— a pile of eight sheep, slashed throats, eyes starless and sentimental; a dog hanging from a pine bough, swaying cord cutting a thin neck. Blind passion, great costs….

[apocalypsis—L. to uncover, disclose] i. “I am the sign of the Letter, / . . .” No seed. Flat beneath my hand: bone. Pelvis a field, but no seed. Because there was no punishment like fucking, its whip burned Adam and nothing after. Because shine took flight like two parrots so deep green they seemed…

to turn on the radio to rearrange the scenery to gnaw on the end of the alphabet is to soften it I could swallow its enzymes when I’m silent I could hammer through the windshield and crawl onto the hood where it is warm I’ve done it before to dismantle the snowman he is melting…

take a boy on a motorcycle feeling powerful. He has achieved the status of the boy on the motorcycle. Only something is not quite right. He rides it like yes, in and out, back and forth like day after day, all okay. That’s just what’s the matter, like nothing happens. So when he gets home,…

:    One might study ornithology & the bird elude him. :    The bird & the study of birds are ordinary things. :    The ordinary’s most beautiful: how earth endures itself      in building’s brittle sunlight, gecko’s scuttle under aloe,      these shadows puddled in mortar & bark & the wind      milled blue through palms….

Aged prophets, cradled in Crivelli’s gold, on a heat-waved page replicating quattrocento frescos, seem shy above the trees’ periscopes as if the sky were an unfamiliar cathedral, and, should they appear there now, standing between receding clouds, how gilded their halo, what color their gowns and what scripted tablet would they hold to admonish the…