Poetry

I walk uptown with a letter in my head, past the piers and the languishing seals, the spiral of a spring day, landmark, harbor, inlet and bay; the ocean into more ocean, the gray of a gray sky. Dear God. Dear Absentee Landlord Who Collects the Checks. Dear Barbershop Glass and Barbicide Blue. Dear Recession…

Let the light be         yellow but not   candle-lit, quiet,         incandescent,   not cold yet         not bright yet enough to sting         the eye, close   enough to see         beside, clear   enough to read  …

In this borrowed house I keep my doors unlocked. A day in the middle of days where if not for worry I’d be alone. I’m cold as vodka. I dress myself back to warmth. Two dogs curl asleep downstairs. One gets up to align an invisible orbit then falls, graceless thud against hardwood. O marriage…

Greet the walker, walking in with the shadow of the hood shooing away the emphatic light. First cold night the blinds flicker down, each vinyl strip a white notion near as wide. August, gone, feels gone. The woman in another room, ever without honeymoon, hits snooze and spreads her hair behind her like the patch…

Sundays my sister Mary and I’d split bags of penny candy in the junkyard after raiding each room of our trailer for loose change and Pepsi cans. Climbing through the interiors of gutted clunkers, we declared truces that wouldn’t last the day. Our lips puckered from flavors— sour patch, lemonhead, warhead, airhead, sour belt, jawbreaker—…

A blackish hue clustered at our heels. You were in the mixed woods which meant I was in the same mixed woods. I kicked up the floor. Needles littered the lower air in standing dust, our shadows dotting the dirt mound sloped unnecessarily away. I peeled back in drying nut husks, upturned trunks of living…

I am the only man in the world because I have no tits. I have a permanent hard-on as long as I am tall and it outweighs me.                                   They say that I have horns, hooves, and a tail, but this is a myth or a lie: my forehead is knobbed, my coccyx is protuberant, and…

You wander into my thought, my happiness, the way the deer wander through the yard these days, very relaxed, with no thought of being hunted, browsing the bushes near the driveway like people at the refreshment table of an art opening… That’s how you come over me— not with a burst of wings, but with…

What am I doing, trudging around Natick, Massachusetts, so archetypal in its split-level, clapboard ordinariness, one house after another like a crowd gathered haphazardly at an accident site? And why explore the deafening blandness of the little streets with fenced-in yards, where day after day—iPod loaded with arias— Ti prego, rubami il cuore!—I wheel the…