Poetry

The scent of mimosas and cured algae at the nape of my neck attracts no one but me. The evening’s ammonic light, busy with free electrons, rinses the curtains to ash. I finger damp calico at my calf and wonder if anyone will be gentle to me. Softened by sweat, the calico fissures secret folds…

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…

Watching it move up the valley in its plentitude between the mountains and me, the rain soaking into each particle of soil, glistening on the tip of each leaf, like the old myth of a god who sees our every thought and deed— impossible, but why not, if rain can do this? Rain: one thing…

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…

Or try to Knowing someday everyone I love will die I’m practicing                               Not for death but To love the labor of my human life           Who can Treasure the broken bone and dish The house in flame or flood and What it takes to fix           I take instead Notes from smaller sufferings Once waking in a…

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

A memorial erected over a void. Usually for a living person who just vanished, but whose death seems indisputable. Begin with a shovel, an empty rectangular cake of earth. Begin with a word, a grail to extinguish all hope. Begin with the story of a child disappearing between his fifth-grade class and the bus stop—baseball…

“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 last two houses brought brightness to her eyes.           Her greatest affection she saved for a succession of Scotties, a breed known to be aloof.           Each one she fed into…