Poetry

  • Paradise

    That story I told you about suffering Was a lie. I never wandered into The woods with a pack of matches. Truth is I was born there, and there I ran the weather. Deer left Apples in my hand, so I didn’t think To cook the deer. The secret of my Life was my life,…

  • Anniversary

    at your marker (they call it a marker) a footstone hipper than headstones           earlier mapquest led to metro north           google to the most reliable cab service in peekskill I bring wheat      tall dry half-live stalks           bought the day before           (new york has everything)           no one questions the harvest shooting from…

  • Traveling Light

    I’m only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I’ll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I’d need for an eternity of traveling light. I’ve left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and…

  • Poems Describing Someone

    May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…

  • Whether

    Maybe your baby done made some other plans. —Stevie Wonder Out of a cinched sack of bones, the dog’s half-cast opiate eyes ask can’t you hear the moths, pelting the pear glass? & then there is nothing else I can hear, bulbs opal and ignited as felted anus-stars of snow spot the porch, blast the…

  • In This House

    In this house that is not mine I hear a home knocking at a door left unlocked for years only the days knew to come and go as they please. At the top of some ridge it has found me with my walls building solitude out of trees. At the nadir of some work it…

  • A Dear Devoted Husband

    Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man—wow—I love how The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning His hip to the right, kind of messy Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle And a hip cocked in the…

  • Disgust

    There’s a preponderance of dog shit in Paris but no one says so, attracted to its other, finer qualities. If people were stepping in that much crap in Detroit you’d never hear the end of it. Motown my ass, they’d say, without so much as a backward glance at the Miracles, the Temptations. They might…