Poetry

Logic—my father’s logic died June 24, 2009, in bright daylight. Murdered in the afternoon. I hung up Missing Person posters of myself and listened for the sound of a tree falling. The sound of the wind through trees is called psithurism. There’s no word for the translator of wind. If the wind is words, the…

For the band of panicked street cats           lapping spoiled soup I’d discarded                               at the base of what I only knew           to call a Mexican rose, and for you, of course,                     dawdling on the lawn, bent over                               a Walmart telescope, in search of stars that are remotest—Andromeda’s                                cities, the vaporous                               shimmering that was the first…

Civility—died on June 24, 2009, at the age of 68. Murdered by a stroke whose paintings were recently featured in a museum, two white square canvases, black scissors in the middle of each, open, pointing at each other. After my father’s stroke, my mother no longer spoke in full sentences. Fragments of codfish, the language…

I have been living           despite myself my territory hemmed by mud and threat of mud          If there is a land without its own subliminal violences          this night offers no defense of what has died in it          Some things are only nourished in a stutter of kudzu and the inconsistencies of silver the moon shucks off           Casual machines honey…

I’m enthralled by a cartoon’s coercion.   Behind me, seen in the television’s reflection— exaggerated colors, animations—children whispering beside the slumbered old men that gravel-in-teeth language: fuck, shit.     I still yearn for youth, to imagine algorithms of birds, waddling outside on the lawn, the boys chasing feathers, and the girls braiding a mother’s…

Bit by bit I’ll go on surviving.   Love like the sheets tumbled soft.   Miles of snow outside Lisbon. Before turning the camera   to the window, Soon, I’ll let you go.   They say that love continues.   That the ghosts or angels will usher us home.   February again, & the table…

By which I mean I look like that flower that fireworks in mid-sentence in the sky, over the end of a sweaty ball game. The crowd makes its way to their cars while popcorn-spill & multicolored chocolate candies melt into concrete steps. Maybe I mean you make me want to live beachfront—so I can taste…

Georgia, forgive me. For years I’ve carried this grief  like a hoop of bone, framing everything I see: fragments  of water, fragments of earth. No visible wound, no body    to bury, no song for safe passage to whatever the next  world brings. I must be the only person here not asking,  Where are the…

Humpbacks in journey rendered,           in Eastern Australian waters an Indian Ocean air. How pleading             tones jump across continents into rivers of sound scientists call non-           human revolution, perplexes. Perhaps   a singer lost course and migrated           east from Antarctic feeding grounds. Did whitecaps trick or force; before             he forged a life worth its…