Poetry

Born with everything but breath He slid into the world a month too soon.   The trees traced with snow, the farm white-roofed, Even the tractor buried useless.   The far mountains gullied white, Lost under an avalanche of cloud.   And the calf nothing more than a flow of soft water, Eyes thin against…

giving over my mode au naturel pure or polluted as I await the unveiling of night’s recycled poetry which resembles our backstory softly rendered contrary for my part so as to make, to mourn to point nude abidance toward freewheeling echo flux that said, we recognize some lucid continuum innermost thoughts taming a restless amnesia…

When the infant head bursts out, the fire begins to die, shoulders, like displaced rocks, find a place to rest until they are pulled, twisted out into the air to steam, then cool. Everything hisses and smokes as when lava finds ocean. Now there is an After. After it is done. After her first minute….

The mask tires of itself. The beautiful dream blown again. The world won’t shake its own hand. Air fills with bone- powder, hair-lint, blood-flecks or the body’s demolished light, shattered mid-thought, mid-stance, mid- breath, mid-word, mid-kiss. Can thinking wend a way back to where the body feels? To where it quivers, retracts, roots? Mind discontinues…

The boys’ stories of the tobacco— splotched and yellow “toad” squirting blood from eyes and licking red ants don’t prepare you for a patch of the field rising and rushing blurry, then stopping, fitting earth tightly, the last puzzle piece.   Nor do you know how you’re guided to it, and though they’ve told you…

my little bird don’t worry bout money she don’t worry little bird for worry don’t add up but a bunch of empty seeds no your single moment is now You long lovely thing your every moment is long and today and also yesterday when meek and lowly the whole world belonged to you You longing…

Where will you go?   Will there be a nail brush, face cream, a cotton-pressed comb? Will there be toothpicks? Dove soap? A small towel? Will there be a shoe horn? Will you sleep? Will there be others? Will there be a quiet room, a firm bed? Will you lie prone with your hands on…

Will I always love you for throwing that skate out of Alan’s boat? Last summer, out lobstering in his Black Fin off Gay Head, only four bloody bluefish left for bait and five more traps to fill, we begged for its life. Did I know then I would leave you after fourteen years? Playfully patriarchal,…

Spackling the golden clouds in a fucking frenzy. I wear my hair mad as a rocket scientist that helpless one morning. Ill, doctor says, & she won’t live years. Did you ever run from your own sick heart choking? What the night knows in the myth of its far lightless pit could lay you flat…