Poetry

Consider history as a cloud or the spread of roots Where nothing is consecutive Except at the moment of singularity, as in when one Walks into the day’s weather, The wind tearing the loose branches, power Lines dipping, and perhaps this is all we could Consider with any validity, for to go beyond this Is…

As in an illuminated page, whose busy edges have taken over. As in: jasmine starred onto the vine-dense walls, stands of phlox, and oranges, the flesh of each chilled turgid. By herself the sleepwalking girl arranged them: the paper airplanes now wrecked on the vines, sodden, crumpled into blooms which are mistaken all morning for…

Tell me a score I should meet at the back of my hair, up there to the left come surprise, scooped from a melon of everything like a moon of toothsome water. Must I grieve to the hoe’s chud chud (for seed I am would not be spat out ever)? Oh, shut up, you had…

There was a prairie of crushed flowers, A prairie that swelled and expired, A prairie of like-it-or-not. Oh but we found it, all of a sudden And straight down below. It was like a mountain as seen from the sky, Like all that sinks and disappears. We wanted to repeat what never happened Or sing…

It is hard to remember about the hardening man he is alive, hard not to hear in the shrill nonsense he speaks when he attempts to speak the chirping of a thrush, any ordinary bird hard to see (but look) beneath his sagging mask a face, once flesh, now lost, a planet— barren and featureless…

Not sibylline but clear, empty weather; of the eight kinds of sky it was the milk-paled potion most like a cup of coffee she poured past full in such a way as to show herself how good she was, how the liquid lolled just over the white cup’s rim, just so the instant before an…

from The Jade Buddha: A Sequence In the midst of a life, out by the propane tank, by the stacked timbers, while magpies kept up their quizzical cat-like calls in the piñons— a little threatening, their small part in the large thinking of the planet, their part to be clever and quick, seasonal marauders at…

I loved one person do you see the evergreen there in fog     one by one I was taught to withdraw first from him do you want to     know how the mind works under extreme cold ice forming on the     eyelid or wind thrown at me I felt every needle felt every breath…

for Taha Muhammad Ali and for Aaron Shabtai From nothing but his fear, and kiss her cunning brows Who braves the risen salar, daughter’s bursting ripeness Moaning through the sash, he marries to a settler The crown sits on his head, to hold her as he wants For him the dead king’s wife, in a…