Poetry

The scent of mimosas and cured algae at the napeof my neck attracts no one but me. The evening’s ammoniclight, busy with free electrons, rinses the curtains to ash.I finger damp calico at my calf and wonder if anyone will begentle to me. Softened by sweat, the calico fissures secretfolds of the vena cava. It…

It will not wait for eggs to hatch, or fruit to ripen. Won’t wait for your coffee to cool, bread to rise, or garden to produce. It won’t wait for your grasp to be firmer, or your loneliness to leave you. Won’t wait for you to make friends, or friends to make you. It will not wait…

All winter, I sent letters to old friends turned strangers,ghosts, representations of other eras, statues & facades. I spoke of sobriety & struggle. I spoke of fatherhood& a new masculine energy tended in the intimacy of a circle of other initiated men. Who am I trying to impress?My teenage son calls everybody bro, even me….

Or try toKnowing someday everyone I love will dieI’m practicing                              Not for death butTo love the labor of my human life           Who canTreasure the broken bone and dishThe house in flame or flood andWhat it takes to fix           I take insteadNotes from smaller sufferingsOnce waking in a guestroom beside the baby disappointedTo be missing a party…

Again, you are the church of what separates wrestlingand professional wrestling. A little money, a lot of folding chairs.What separates knowing how to speak a language and knowinghow to play an instrument is smaller than the differencebetween the blood on my shirt being mine or someone else’s.The French are allowed sincerity, which separates themfrom the…

Watching it move up the valley in its plentitudebetween the mountains and me, the rainsoaking into each particle of soil, glisteningon the tip of each leaf, like the old mythof a god who sees our every thought and deed—impossible, but why not, if rain can do this?Rain: one thing and a billion things. Listen as…

A memorial erected over a void. Usuallyfor a living person who just vanished, butwhose death seems indisputable. Begin with a shovel, an empty rectangularcake of earth. Begin with a word, a grail to extinguish all hope. Begin with the storyof a child disappearing between his fifth-grade class and the bus stop—baseball bat and glovediscarded on…

“Being Property Once Myself. I have a feeling for it …”—Lucille Clifton

I never saw my mother hold her husband’s hand          or stroke his blue-blazered shoulder.Compliments were reserved for thin women and          handsome priests. London and her lasttwo houses brought brightness to her eyes.          Her greatest affection she savedfor a succession of Scotties, a breed known to be aloof.          Each one she fed into obesity,half her plate scraped into the dog’s…