Poetry

Often, we love best what is hidden: the locket, our initials etched entwined on the back, the wool coat’s pink silk lining, the painting beneath a painting, its faint hills and far-off church. Last month I bought a pitcher, only to discover that, when tipped to pour, it reveals a hidden message underneath. We love…

Awake in the blue hour, something pleasant just out of reach, the only movement an incandescent flicker: the pulse at his throat. I want to want to put my mouth on it, to tongue each salty crevice of his neck but don’t. After 20 years of waking here I just watch the beat lift his…

How is starlight traveling in the scald of day? I don’t know, but I’m sure it does. And that star over you has lit candles in the bay where the fish never sleep and where my breath goes wandering among the harbor lights carrying the dreams I remember and the ones I forget, those rendered…

Saturday as an old friend Sits like a sphynx queen On the Daedalus roof deck, I pray that she too Is not pregnant before me. Sunday, I finish the porch Back in VT under What is apparently called A Strawberry Moon. White-blue paint Spits into the black Plants below while I howl THIS IS MY…

I watch them smear themselves Around the world and worry. I want them with me. To fold Them inside a garish treasure Chest that I will lower into the sea. There’s me, middling on The perfect surface of the mad Pacific While my best loves sleep Beneath, conserved, Coldbodied. Kept Souls keeping me. Their bodies…

in your best bluesy voice. I want to start over. Not at the beginning but where something takes hold that could never belong to me. Breath by the fringe of the sea, I give you back my first child-cries, the smear of world that took hold as flesh, Time with its shake-down-the-house hunger alarms, its…

Walk alive in the woods in the waking faint of Spring, on circling pathways beside a goose-honking lake, through Sapsucker Woods’ dense wetlands and forest, as a papier-mâché moon floats over mud-dried leaves, sunglare flashes chrome off the water, gold bursts of marsh marigolds rise from green tussocks, and hairy ropes of poison ivy snake…

The fridge don’t work. The milk comes out thick; when you shake the jug it sloshes heavy-footed breaking through the gospel of your grandmother’s duplex; her fridge always broke, and you always questioned why like why we gotta refrigerate in the freezer? Like why we gotta unthaw the milk for breakfast? The answer is because,…

Somebody says dig deep. Hunker down like you would in the only bed you’d ever slept. With a flannel blanket head to toe, its color-hued fort only you know, distorting the under-light. Venture back to that kingdom. It was not the fetal position; you had no need to hide. Mark the Noah’s ark measuring stick…