Poetry

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…

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…

What else to do with sorrow but to buy her a drink, walk it over to her table, set it down in front of her (Sorrow is a woman, always has been, always will), and say the only pick-up line you’ve ever heard that works, “Drink this until I start to look handsome.” And she’ll…

We interfere with what we know by knowing it. We interfere with what we do by doing it. We interfere with what we love by loving it. I guess you could say we’re the causes of our own loneliness. We interfere with what we watch by watching it. We interfere with what we write by…

It’s been over a year since he was last seen near the park’s boathouse, where birdwatchers congregate for coffee and small children lob oversized chunks of stale bread at the ducks, igniting and re-igniting their squabble. Fluorescent flyers–Missing husband and father of two, 40 years old, seizure disorder— have been replaced with more recent sightings;…

A man and a woman in bed at night breathe in, breathe out earthly pleasure, crunch of red clay beneath my shoes when I take the gravel path past the old dairy through the hillside pasture. Midwinter provides another meaning, by which I mean that other, more elusive, pleasure I know when I see, first,…

to address mystery without being mysterious, never expecting anyone to know, speaking only for yourself but not be self-centered, conducting yourself as if your work mattered, never naming what you love, believing in truth– as who doesn’t?–and not trying to say something, not contenting yourself with saying nothing, to bow down, to hate nothing and…

My aunt sat with a drink, the afternoon lit on the sill and half of her beautiful face when she spoke of her first death. It happened after a storm. Silver rays formed beams on the sea through the gray clouds and the surf pounded the sandy stretches of the Jersey shore. A rip current…

Women are right: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die. Men are wrong: They suppose there can be a deathless meaning; or else that there can be joy without meaning. Women know the double truth: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die.