When the pilot calls it rough air, I think of a cat’s tongue,as if the air itself were textured, as if we could feel its sandpaperlicking our skin. I swallow my ears open, and the silencewhich is not silence at all fills them. In the absence of faith I resort to magical thinking. I pray…
Something’s falling in increments of banging and slight popping, klunks,and then littlechittering rolls,the roof I mean is being hit by objectsnuts, fruitsof the season: this miserable natural worldhurls these things…and then there’re the wolf howlsor coyotesas they callthem here and the barks and snuffles of so-called bearsand yesterday I saw a small tub-bottomed bishopcrossing the…
sometimes I’m issued a new headand the old one dropsoff and then I see the new one isn’t newit’s a usedhead, sometimes a bit moldyor flushedwith rage, this headfilled with notes on what is wrong with the worldor carrying a listof expendables or groceriesa head that remembers sunset castinga golden shineinto the wheator the painting…
A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave.It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holidayin the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the otherthe same plus chestnut spots, drift abovewhite-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richnessto the situation, paralleling the stinks and murderpoking up everywhere, each an…
a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hillsor someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a coldlobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrasethat explains everything and then you’re revokingyesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattanor you’ve just changed the name of your dreamboat and…
I took absence down to the ocean and becauseit is blind, I told it about the waves.I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my armsaround the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges.I walked beside absence in the streets at nightand I let it tell me stories. Child who is…
Every drip startles me: rain falling off the edge of mooninto the earth. Asleep next to a man who does not love meany more than he loves a river. I move to another room,closer to the rain without being touched. My brother sleeps (does he sleep?) in a rehab center in the Blue Ridge Mountains.I pray…
“Fire at a Brooklyn Warehouse Puts Private Lives on Display,”(1 Feb 2015, The New York Times) No lives were lost. Nothing was guttedbut the crumpling warehouse and its contents:medical forms, court transcripts, sonograms, bank checks. They’re like treasure maps,someone said of the half-charred scraps.But they weren’t. This was the opposite— it was as if the…
It’s 11:02.I was supposed to take the kids outside at 10:13.My underwear is over my head.I’m trying to sniff out the boy I once was,my private parts tiny and nutmeg.I didn’t give a shit about Superman.I was in love with Watergate.Watergate was my super hero.All that corruption. That darkness.Those men in black suits, greasy hair,…
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