Poetry

for my wife, Katherine The film of your brain is a map drawn by conquerors flying the banner of exploration and misnaming all the islands, yet we sail through the clouds swirling in this hemisphere, navigate rivers of silver till we find the white slash circled in red that tells us stroke, hemorrhage, as if…

At last she decided to speak to the moon. Having no other choice, she begged it to set her free. Why me, she asked, when others are content to sit on their haunches all night peering at your sullen face; or feel your granite pull beneath skin and obey, opening wave upon wave. When no…

He’s on top of her, barely moving, at the swimming hole I’ve called mine for years. Here, to be anything but naked is nearly sacrilegious. In the quick red canyon water sears the dusty plain. My daughter plays, oblivious to them, delicious in her two-year skin, but I can’t not look (and must if I’m…

The day threatens its hold over me, the storm closes in on the lake though I’ve heard it before, we’ve begun with the moon. Plainly stated with my silver pen: I wait for the day to fill me, to make its choice. I spin myself smaller; listen, I will not tell everything. With eating comes…

One unexceptional bright afternoon in August, coming from the rose garden secreted behind the rue Villehardouin, I thought, fleet, furtive, If I lived alone I could stay here                            and pushed the thought away as firmly and unlikely as Might rain later because I wanted just to choose and I had chosen, more than cobblestones…

You believe, if you cast wide enough your net of want and will, something meaningful will respond. Perhaps we are the response— each a cresting echo hesitating, vibrant with the moment before rippling back. But you’re steadfast as Odysseus strapped to the mast, as you were in ’81 when Reagan ordered you back to work….

Your papillae momentus is shot, these pills may help but you’ll probably lose your right arm. My right arm! How will I live? So the client thrashes out of the office like a man learning to swim by drowning but after a couple weeks, he can almost float, button his own coat. So he goes…

        To the loft and to them I came to be the opiate, not the administered,         fiending to become the body without self, reversible as a jacket, Able Was         I Ere I Saw Elba, as the trompe l’oeil in Psych remaining two faces         human, the Queen and her Consort, seen from another…

The horse, Susan said, because it is the blankest of slates, or because our success—our genes’ successes—are linked, has been written on extensively by our needs. Dumb giants pawing the ground, father, mother, escape, sexuality glistening and rippling, forelock and fetlock, footloose and fearless, or the pleasures of the fearful—fleeing the sudden gesture, careening through…