Poetry

When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…

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…

Early in his narrative Flaubert constructs a magnificent ball at La Vaubyessard, the estate of the Marquis d’Andervilliers and in that chapter I direct my family to the moment just after the quadrille and before the cotillion when the air in the ballroom grows so thick and heavy the Marquis orders a servant to climb…

If never was the question. Even then. That when feels closer now might embarrass me before this window, more mirror than I would like at this hour, bathos of years ghosting face, throat, my impatient turning off of the lamp. Now I’m small again, and the world outside mysterious, perfumed, & large. Were I not…

The mule went blind and we were destitute. By day, it kept knocking its skull into trees. We moved to the barn where the mule curled up to us in sleep, its tubular hooves kicking through a dream. It wore a head bandage. My grandfather took on the role of the poet. “Never throw your…

The Muses are giving a thousand poets, painters, dancers The back of their hands, and having flown, seat themselves On the hypnotically spinning stools of Hartley Farms Where they are mouthing the giant menu with tremendous glee: Raspberry swirl, chocolate marshmallow fudge, swiss mocha almond… And motioning for Marina and Sophia in their green-and-white aprons…

When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field. “Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I…

Wine festered—a thorn at the bottom of my skull. Wind blew all the night’s big ideas off the trees. The moon had frostbite. The stars did, too. Be kind to animals was my mother’s mantra. Do your duty was my father’s. Ghosts breathed on my rearview mirror as I drove downtown. On black ice glistening…

—not in knowledge, but in calm; not in indifference, but nearly. Under bullying fog the white houses stand with effort on the coast, the tides teasing the scrub blue, the land beneath hassled by waves, drowning in salt-wine. The lichen, as scalloped and ridged as the cliffs, breathes red and gold; its smell, like the…