Poetry

Further west there was the bee-buzz of Sirens impassioned like the jobless. Already gone were the thick shoes on the shore-rock as they changed to hooves. Gone as well all souls puffing behind the ship like an ash-cloud in a slow wind. Everything had come to be nude: the voices munching in me like a…

whose strict interpretations are no help to me this morning— you can’t meet my need to go through the world unseeingly; I must attend your demonstrations. Turn the pepper-leaves to earrings, knight the sugar, turn light to salt, cups to miners’ lamps then back to whole seasons of rain in the subcontinent. I move in…

Sad song, thousand-mile voice, the crows throwing their existential shadows about. About what? Sad song little while. Little wheel. So the red petticoat flashes. The singer claps. O love of my life, our flesh is pulled away no matter. Foot slam. How we try. Foot slam. To hold each other in our mouths. So now…

I had in hand my stamped yellow ticket and passed on information—that I should walk to the farthest end of the auto salvage yard for what I said I needed, a door. Loosely, I had in mind a modern underworld, the twisted, broken bodies organized by make and name for convenience. “Do you know what…

And sleep to grief as air is to the rain, upon waking, no explanation, just blue spoons of the eucalyptus measuring and pouring torrents. A kind of winter. As if what is real had been buried and all sure surfaces blurred. Is it me or the world, risen from beneath? Mind refining ruin, or an…

What if we could look at language as matter [as real and outside our imagining as granite or cedar trees] and move inside words, the way particle physicists break into atoms with the force of their own energy and light? To track the intelligent chaos of language by threshing open the word,                        olive pressed…

A little morning of Scarlatti, and prudent flowers, white tulips even whiter in light from the window’s true divided panes, grass, a rufus-sided towhee and invisible fox in shadow, yes, this was witnessed while a second dream went on, a knife slitting through an abdomen and upward to a chest wall, a whole country grimacing,…

He tells the deputies he was drowned as a boy in a well of holy water, and so has returned this way: full wet, a rattle of bones beneath his clothes, and all manner of love for his fellow man coming over him each time the way a storm comes over a mountain. The long…

Days uncoiling like the hose from her fingers, days measured by the mechanical car buzzing down the driveway. Her boys wrestle for the control box, shriek, their calls tear the air, hush the birds, and send her, with hose, to transmit water against their heads just enough to shut them off. Now only the sound…