Poetry

1. Three people walk on a cockle hill: broad-forehead Coleridge, yakking away emphatic whirling his arms; tall Wordsworth keeping his steady measure in long strides; serene Dorothy, taking it in, quiet, melding the men. A farm dog, half-grown, short-legged, snags their scent and runs to accost them, growls a moment, bares his teeth as if…

All winter two giant snowballs stood in the center of the trampled schoolyard, & another one off to the side I felt bad for, then felt foolish feeling bad for. Every day I observed them through the chain link fence. Three giant snowballs the strewn parts of a would-be snowperson’s body. I’m trying not to…

under the overpass of the Cross Bronx, the headlights flash on broken concrete—between cars and exit ramp—and some undefined hunk of metal rising out of broken glass; then the disconnected passage that got us to Manhattan comes to me like a collage of cities spilling off the map. All I know is my father left…

I am the lion. I am the keeper of the keys. Black hats float upon the waters. When I think, I’m sad; when I don’t, I’m elated, over-joyed. Dazzled by the silverblackbacked mirrorwings of three ravens, I follow the shadow dancers onto thin ice! Once I drank silence from a spring, Once I opened slowly…

I had a dream over and over as a child in my shimmering morning-light room, —it was set there, where I slept, woodpeckers hammering at the eaves, the river’s waves’ light moving as if forever on the far wall. I’d wake (still asleep) in the dream —I couldn’t speak!— as the two hands hovered. So…

A brick warehouse, a cold morning,and Newark in the distance. Bleakis how I take my coffee, insidea shipping container while a planecranks by. Thinking something about “the bloom of youth” somethingI’ve lost something a manwould feel right saying but which sitsunder my tongue, unwanted pill. I do take the bitter train throughNew Jersey but this…

Remember the night it snowedin a place we were told would never snowand like two shadows cast by a lampstanding in the presence of a Greaterwe walked the beach the sand’s grit limpidthe expanse of what I didn’t know endlesslyswallowing the floes the ocean has always beenimmutable and dumb has always carried onpast my limitations…