Poetry

Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty      tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods' gaudy nectarine shades            ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers.                        A musical idea.                                                      Macaws      scarlet and violet,                                    tangerine as a…

I hear her splintering like the seed inside the pine cone, the furious grease inside the smoke and speed of the fire of our bodies. The hard red seed of her, her pink nipple, her penis-husk, her odors and hairs, her molecular dust, her dream file, her first and last word, her undiscussed déjà vu's,…

Awe-inspring cliff, white desire. Water springing forth from blood. Let my form narrow, let it crush my body, so that everything is one: slag and skeletons, fistful of earth. You drink me as though draining off the color of my soul. You lap me up, a little fly in a tiny boat. My head is…

for R. H. After visits to his hospital bed where sickness slowly played a jazz garden in his head, I watered leaves and stems to a green brilliance, troweled back the influence of weeds, things I'd do for any friend knowing what is temporary. Just days before his release the leaves grew brassy, stems decidedly…

Excuse me, Sir, if sweet words turn to silver bullets in bad light where industrial signs stammer VACANCY all night over peep shows and fortified wines in the eye of the most liveable city. But you see this overcoat won't release me though winter's 5 months through and I'm sick to death of the mouthwash…

Under pressure Mick tells me one of the jokes truckers pass among themselves: Why do women have legs? I can't imagine; the day is too halcyon, beyond the patio too Arizonan blue, sparrows drunk on figs and the season's first corn stacked steaming on the wicker table. . . .I give up; why do they?…

Four a.m. and the trees in their nocturnal turns seem free from our ideas of what trees should be like the moment in a dance you let your partner go and suddenly she's loose fire and unapproachable. Yesterday I saw L. again, by a case of kiwis and she seemed wrongly tall as if wearing…

You're going to waste away in dreams so thin they'll slide down a long straw and disappear in a stream going counterclockwise in Tasmania. We're having fritters and syrup, wheatcakes and strawberry butter, double-roasted coffee, and heavy cream. It's your summer solstice, blue green basic morning. This is positively your last chance. I mean it….

October now, it must be snowing at that dead end where mountains' cupped hands held us up to sky. Here, a surprise snow I watch from your hospital window as I pluck dead blossoms from plants that crowd the sill. What aches as much as anything is the ruse of only weeks ago: you and…