Poetry

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,…

In this new country of ours we will, let’s face it, be endlessly debating,endlessly refining, so much talking!—at least in the beginning, whenwe’ve just arrived. And probably later as well, always arriving as we arein this mortality, with so much to say and so little mind-reading. Wewill continue to use words to say our ideas…

In our new country we will notice, cherish, entirely disregard time, in-hale hours and exhale days, float and surf and snorkel into the minutesand years, time like a blanket over or under us, wrapped around ourbeachchilled skin. Our time will be free of owners, a fact of life on thisparticular planet, like air and sea,…

In the new country we will bike through the town in most weather,barrowing smaller humans or parcels in the front when we must or like,pulling wagons, flashing our prettiest wheel-lights at night, double-riding, even triple-riding. Mostly we will wheel through the streets at aleisurely speed allowing for chitchat, perhaps playing the old music outof tiny…

In our new country, all toilets will be composting toilets, inside orouthouse, some with wide stalls for wheelchairs, some with built-in stepsfor small humans, mostly sit-down and some with urinals, for easiestcollection of the pee we will feed microbial fuel cells from which later wewill shear electricity. And we will build such clever sewers, such…