Poetry

Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…

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…

It was time for me to go. I drank a beer and a whiskey and should have been sipping Italian sodas, should have been home watching an old movie or reading Twain but I decided to feed my limitations instead. Get a little drunk. Get a little sad. The woman sitting next to me calls…

Here is a tawny doe who chews a reed’s tip; behind the reeds, a lion whose red tongue droops. Yet in the doe’s prayer, the lion is a singing bird, and in the lion’s prayer, the doe is a flowering tree. And in the bird’s prayer, the tree that blooms incarnadine and evergreen, is our…

(script for ten voices) Light Rain: Plink, plink. Nothing counts for much. Pedestrians: We might go get a sandwich. Do we have time? Sure we do. We might go and buy a jacket. Life: I am long, I am long. For you I am long (even if not for a few who suffer weird disasters…

What he hated most about family Was the depth and the duration Of the emotion, the delimiting Nest, net, and trap of it all… Ours was not a poor family, Caught in that single word poor, But ours was an ascetic family, Caught in that one word. We had our dignity. We had Books and…

A gas flare throbs, an ignition Urged out from the interlacing steel. Over the refinery, it hovers, So long as pipelines rush raw oil Thrilling through A circulating need, so long As a man must be propelled Forward & his engine filled. The burning occupies the black air Like a moth transfixed— Still living, fluttering,…

At Wellesley it was a henna-haired Swiss who had just come out, who, one night, when I was tracing a table of constellations, gathered enough courage to sit on my desk and tell me, I like women. She became an idol of that sisterhood, which meant she rarely came back to our room to sleep…