Poetry

I’m a pea farmer. There’s a stream out back. I like the sound of it. One day out of the week, I bring home a string of brown trout and slap them down on the kitchen table. The fish god provides. If someone knocks on my door rather than stroll in, I don’t like it….

A swirl of leaves tosses its bag of colors over the shoulder of an unmarked road. In the century- old barn where the leaves take refuge, the wind is a permanent resident rehearsing the music of abandonment. And in this hollow the leaves— who found each other before they got lost and braided—are endlessly tweaking…

The minute I feel the urgent glow Quick in the black you’re smiling Up at what I have no right to call A harvest moon (that’s not code). Let me ask you for something, A good shoulder-pounding and the tub’s Aromatic salts, a cigar is just No justice, no peace. October Crushes your soft lip….

The rednecks are loathsome I know maybe because they’ve hardly been anywhere or because they don’t wonder if there’s a God or because they’re too busy wearing boots the ends of which could be knives and cotton T-shirts the sleeves of which maybe they think were invented to wrap cigarettes in and hair that’s so…

Named after the Romantic poet who swam the Grand Canal, The bewildered surfer lives with his girl, his boy in a duplex by the shore. But the house isn’t a teepee in a field like where he grew To a state with his mother and father and sibs in northern forests Bewildered, though now he…

Presto! Vortices that come off birds from a passing shadow to a developing storm. As soon as light hits the water, they’re in the zone, low in the shallows, waiting out the night, the paralysis of the icy laws of fact. Amphibian between being, non-being, who does not know the number of his fingers? Or…

What else to do with sorrow but to buy her a drink, walk it over to her table, set it down in front of her (Sorrow is a woman, always has been, always will), and say the only pick-up line you’ve ever heard that works, “Drink this until I start to look handsome.” And she’ll…

We interfere with what we know by knowing it. We interfere with what we do by doing it. We interfere with what we love by loving it. I guess you could say we’re the causes of our own loneliness. We interfere with what we watch by watching it. We interfere with what we write by…

It’s been over a year since he was last seen near the park’s boathouse, where birdwatchers congregate for coffee and small children lob oversized chunks of stale bread at the ducks, igniting and re-igniting their squabble. Fluorescent flyers–Missing husband and father of two, 40 years old, seizure disorder— have been replaced with more recent sightings;…