Poetry

The toothache drills a hole to the suitcase filled with singed clothes of the woman who died in a crash. Further inside, a shelf I made when I left my first country, plank I put myself on with my wooden doll and wooden dog.

for W.S.Merwin God is in the dogs The one who turns in circles, the one With bloody scabs, the one who wears the huge collar Who stares and stares And tries in spite of it to smell the dirt and grass In the abandonment, torrential muteness My knees loosened, my glassy eyes of crystals warmed…

but, Susie, there’s a great corner still; I fill it with that is gone, I hover round and round it, and call it darling names, and bid it speak to me, and ask it if it’s Susie —Emily Dickinson, letter 85 All I had to do was pull this thread and your stunt double came…

Hard times, true But when hard times Come remember We are hard people, too.

He thumbs a corner of Verlaine,            plucks those pages like a dulcimer, even when the train lurches            not looking up from there but pawing at the air for a handhold,            and my God! what a head— stamped from some stuff…

The morning Jacob called us to the field and said he would take us back to the land of his father, Isaac— the one led up the mountain by his father to be bound and knifed and burnt for love of the god of his fathers, I thought, I will not. I would stay, I…

In between “host” and “glint” is ghost. A “hint” will hiss next to “guess.” For example also the virtue of frost is moisture And in icicles, glaciers or in a body’s cooling gestures the centuries pile up. Bone too, keeps a ballad interior. Lacuna if it could speak would be laconic. Winter seethes and wrecks us,…

after Gwendolyn Brooks       I. 1981. When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on barstools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is…

There were helicopters in the earth and they rose and flew through the earth each morning they flew into our flowerpots our balconies As they circle over us, right next to us, their iron boxes with propellers shine Sonya sticks her fingers she’s putting her fingers she shovels her     fingers in my gums me to…