Poetry

                                                            how much of the hand is fist my father asks—                                                   for him it’s half what you’d expect—the tape’s temper                between splint and split knuckles: symbol’s useless rigor;                                         the long ride home—                                                             for the boy with the torn lip, it’s half what you’d expect                                  …

maybe it’s too early for glow, slow as                                                                       she left our house one day, a cloud slung like what a soldier might carry                                                                       a bolt against a red door, and never came back home—I’ll never understand why                                                                       not once more to gather _________ my mother, for example, carried                                                                       the May lilacs, vulgar in their epithet,…

The orchard rippling in torrential wind and apples themselves bob or drop, a swift lapsarian plunge. Meal and moldering— in every core, trace cyanide and seed.   Again, again, against the wind, my hat like such small boat with sail taught, tugging. A lowtide mind, a rough dumb slosh-round bone. The satisfaction to be gained…

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…