Poetry

  • The Bistro

    Chitchat—an amalgamated moan. Pisswarm Zywiec at a table of crumbs. Beneath the pine-white floor pertains To the barman flipping cassettes. Real worms articulate our options Through darkly blistering earth— From bones in soil most at home The mole builds his swimming pool. Nearby, the guns of the alliance heat up, Snag and burn on the…

  • [This Is a Picture]

    This is a picture of the unrequited. It wants you to touch it. Its torso exists as a diagonal plane of yellow crumbling into black: a horizon where it turns, cell by cell, into dust. Cropped at the neck, it yet retains a dumb capacity to love. For which it reprimands itself repeatedly. Yesterday it…

  • Last Song

    You sang to me throughout the winter the same desultory song. Each flake of snow, each pellet of ice fell like music to the frozen ground. I lived on crackers in a cardboard house. Got down on my knees and sang to the dirt, “Go ahead, my dear. Eat all his fruit this year. Each…

  • Swan Song

    Gloria in your opera gloves Among these ruins see not the glory that was but that it is. Hollowed of purpose behold Light falling withstand Its song hums you & leads to leas of morning.

  • [I Took a Picture]

    “I thought a bench was a simple possibility: one could sit on it.” —Rosmarie Waldrop I took a picture of the bench from behind because I wanted to show the vantage rather than what was seen from it—in this case, a stand of trees angling outward, away from the bench, over the river. Although I…

  • Burnens (ii)

    Never a question of staying, the end never named. His words move my hand, he speaks then listens, the lid pried free, the brood-hum now open to the sky. They have a very nice sense of proportion & the space required for the movement of bodies. My ruler measures the gap, I count each worker…

  • Everything

    Friends should learn to think differently about leaving— everything goes away: the sun, clouds, even stars become nothing after a while                            *   *   * Remember when we found that old mill by the stream? The fallen walls, leaves dropping, ancient mounds of archeology Remember being 13? The angle of the light? And how we…