Poetry

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…

Rain (as it will). And it is dusk. And you with song upon slim voice. There is need: A reminiscence. (Partaken.) Baptized Presbyterian. We remember the names. The names. Their passing. Were days or something close. Closed. Coiled in our attic bed. To wrap ourselves (us even) as it would be. (There was singing. a…

for Lee Chapman The sky first. Hobbled by an absence,                          no vertebrae, the weight of an incessant moon—that extraction to one’s own madly grinning                                  core over and over. And those stars itching away like a feast of lice; even its underpinnings are strung                 only to echo      to echo . . ….

Night’s glass towers, Rapunzel’d by the sun, still stand at attention when the work’s all done like dragon dogs guarding the Mahayana heavens, or sentries at the outpost, leaning, nodding. Solariums of labor, they’re useless to the moon, pitched punctuation without any words. Harbors of security to paper-clipping functions now rest in darkness as mute…

Nothing else to do But love while waiting. We hold our hands To the flames until we no longer know What we wait for.

freedom is what you can buy with a song. after the song has been soldered into your lungs. after the song has beaten its way inside your dreams. after the song has snuck its way into your bed. after the song has knuckled you under. after the song has festered and blossomed and festered again….

A spring wind hustles hundreds of pages into the street, discarded leaflets like pieces of a shredded textbook under the feet of high school students let out for lunch. A young woman bends and grasps a flier: sliver of promise, passport to enter through the golden arches, gateway to the west, up escalator to immediate…