Poetry

Brush of sunlight on the dry grass. These shadows blowing black up the mountain, and elsewhere there is laughing, you are moderate, see, I am there. A noise from inside the neighbor’s window. In the dark drifts you gather— let drop the poor idea— kisses him swiftly and leaves. That we may be increased. Thrum…

Thrift built us a shed out back in which to stow our set. I see a sky. A cloud with a carpenter’s hand in it. I know that shed. An all-day affair with particle board and steel hinges. All of us standing at attention, feeling—     my family and I— (and I was youngest, and…

The great sports hero can remember When he thought sex was just for fun. Now he’s desperately affixed to woman number 53,671.

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…

My name in the black air, called out in the early morning. A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning. Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning. The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun…

I was sitting at a picnic table at one of the godforsaken places peeling an egg as if in this act I could recover what there was of gentleness and I was alone unless you counted the two forms of life, one sea and one land, that fought over the eggshells and stole pieces of…

One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight— but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray while a single…