Poetry

Would’ve said, did you see the calves all copper and gold, cold leaning into their hulking mothers?   Would’ve said, I grew up warm in a house with the wrong kind of bounty, sulking all over myself.   Would’ve said room temperature affection is the gelded way I try to keep you from disappointment.  …

“We drank no milk for months, maybe a year,” my mother told me, “they poured a famine’s worth down the drains; all talk that summer was of nuclear clouds and acid rain.”   Then came the crumbling of the Wall, and my father’s tears— my childish vision of him as the last communist, bathed in…

          Maybe what a river loves most about the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it— is their willingness or resignation to being           mere context for the river’s progress or retreat, depending. And maybe how the cattails and reeds flourish there means they prefer           a river-love—how the river, running always away   the way rivers…

It’s like a habit with you— your idea of tenderness— leading the blameless a little more blame-ward just so you yourself can feel a bit less lonely: in what world   is that tenderness? And though I disagreed with him, I made no argument, because really why were we talking about any of this or,…

Late autumn in the orange-bronze ranges And the sky still wet with slaughter, the vote Done, dying goldenrod tuning the meadows Beige under flocks of birds that flex the air Into one black v after another, Carrying with them the occasional Silence that flight coaxes from the chest, throat, And mind, coaxes from altitude’s blue…

Book I   Of a first disobedience, and the fruit Of that tree, whose mortal taste brought death Into the world, and all our woe. Sing Muse, How heaven and earth rose out of chaos; Aid my adventurous song that intends To soar while it pursues things attempted In prose and rhyme. Instruct me from…

All night, the wildfires burn in Paradise.             You’ve been in Texas for a week           comforting your mother.   Ashes swarm our porchlight in a warm wind.             How long will you be gone? I ask.           You say that you’re not sure:   It’s hard. Her new apartment’s strewn with boxes—             and she won’t…

Look, netted in shadows of dying elms, we study our sandwiches like manuals, unscrew thermos warheads, doze,   hat brims down, while one cups a joint as if it were a hatchling, offering the cinder, its smoke a rope flung   to where I toil astride this trough of what I never want to set,…

And yet, off alone, we were happy with what stayed the same, and we stood there in the space between world and plaything, upon a spot which, from the beginning had been established for pure event. —Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Fourth Elegy” Translated by Edward Snow     Beneath the highway, the stream was…