Poetry

I don’t know, he said, I guess it’s something I’d like, an ocean with such ugly fish down there dark, ones with barbs and lantern lights affixed to their heads. It’s all I got, said the voice. And this wet suit to go with it, this backpack of oxygen, this camera, this knife. Be careful….

They mouthed the surface of the creek for nymphs tasting their temporary life or striders sculling the tension that was neither water nor air but border, merely. The way a dream nibbles at awareness, the sunnies dared the surface. From the footbridge I saw them school in the little depth below the watercolor that was…

          Is the sleeve of that racist century as wrought or gold-chained     as Henry VIII’s who strolls in and says          I’m what matters,               intestines sagging, the regal spittle     bound to stick on dog fur? That’s where…

Every once in a while, it’s true: I get sick of dying. Iambic ghosts choiring                                        their lovely, churchless songs, All the lines of the poem leaning toward terminus Like rows of low windbent weeds—    …

Alright, I’ll tell you the weirdo dream I had, but before I unwind that yarn, let’s twist our common thread. Like you, I stare plumb through the wall sometimes, because I’m thinking of a tree and a little tenant house beside it, and you-know-who on the stone step watching as I pretend I’m a butterfly…

What I see in one eye and not the other. A moon that slices away at the dark. The past and what’s coming. Unlike the little hunchbacked shrew hopping mindless across the road. Or crickets, eating anything in their path, gardens, grass, each other. We’re different. We anticipate. For the others, it’s the music without…

Will I always love you for throwing that skate out of Alan’s boat? Last summer, out lobstering in his Black Fin off Gay Head, only four bloody bluefish left for bait and five more traps to fill, we begged for its life. Did I know then I would leave you after fourteen years? Playfully patriarchal,…

Spackling the golden clouds in a fucking frenzy. I wear my hair mad as a rocket scientist that helpless one morning. Ill, doctor says, & she won’t live years. Did you ever run from your own sick heart choking? What the night knows in the myth of its far lightless pit could lay you flat…

In the end, the end seems probable, but before come many votes and murders.   The common redstart votes for its own splendor among the other splendid things;   the virgin murders her own abashed vocabulary, pretending to a toughness she does not as yet possess.   Possess she will, in time, a rude demeanor…