Poetry

Plow your tweener backpack into your fellow sinner.  I was fallen too.  Sulk into your years and cropped organdy nails. Everybody’s watching.  Your body’s burnt to ash,  to the stranger’s thumbprint on your stubborn pimples.  I see a younger you,  a candle-smoke ghost hardening into form,  fleshy knees and fists marbled at the altar rail. You’re still the baby  who asked no deliverance. We’re not fallen. We’re great apes, pupae, whales,  you’re a studious, overheated ostrich, as unformed as imagery in your mind’s eye,  fortune’s adolescent child, daydreamer on…

is about sorrow the same way the 56-ounce bag of redwhite and blue M&Ms is about sorrow. The formerhas a chorus in which Jurado croons is in your armswhile the latter features text—resealable zipper!—at bag’s top because if you’ve got somethingtoo stupid to say aloud you should shout it. 71˚, Mayin Indiana, the sun+breeze so…

The last time I saw my fathersound and marrow-filled, he was standing on the front porch—almost the weight of a ghost. As I waved goodbyeI felt a nerve twitch— like a dog’s ear batting a fly.He never sold me the world. He never said that peopleare good. But the next morning when he stopped like…

I don’t often revisit the year I fosteredall the neighborhood strays, teenagers enticed by decay and overrunwith the lesions that wistfulness deals. I don’t often revisit the year my parentsdisappeared, but whose house we filled with smoke so indissolubleit consoled like blindness— the year pedestrians crossed the streetto avoid my yard, alive with ragwort and…

reading on the couch, your messy hairfinally beginning to gray. You arebreathing, moving moleculesof air aside, inhabitingspace that could go emptyso easily. You holda heating pad to your sidewhere I bruised your rib, clumsyin my hunger for your infinitevariety. ya’aburnee,lovers say in Arabic—you bury me.It’s quiet enoughthat I can hear the ringing alwaysin the background…

You know how lightning never lasts long enoughto get a good look at it? and your eyes do this thing,as if they could grow larger, widen out of your facetrying to see enough,longer, more— this happens also when the heron passes: too quickly.Today I lucked into seeing how richly blueare the tops of his wing-feathers….

What I got of worldly gumption I learned in the church of false assumption. Under the sentence of wrath and fire I studied the windows, the girls in the choir.

A small room, a small porch, a large window, a stove, a table, a chair, a cot, a few books, a few thoughts, a notebook, a pencil, an eraser…

Gary Snyder is a man of the West and of the Far East, which is farther west. Or say you go to the east, and then you’ll come first to the East, but then to the West, which is Europe the seat of Western Civilization. American historians know that Kentucky once was the West and…