Poetry

Grusamericana (Whooper)

Marked by Apollo with a red coin on the forehead, this one still waits, solitary, uncoupled on extraordinary legs, not gull-like or chicken-like, not tree-clinging or perching. He dreams a wet return to the sand flats and shallows of the Blackjack Peninsula, of flying over lands with mutual wing easing their flight as in Paradise…

Praise Poem for American Girls

Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex-    boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could    get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn,    romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line    waving paper…

Zydeco on Dog Hill

Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in half and sent her father strolling across the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page…

Logos

for Linda Gregg   Safe in the light along the bank Being in believing No name     Only being On the bank radiant and blank Safe watching and seeing    On the brink Of the light    Blank    No blame in being Waiting then breathing in being Seeing Singing    Let my voice   …

The Florida Sandhill Crane

By wings whose shapes are but half a heart?    Feathers oiled with    country clubs and gasps of delight? Not for these the sandhill crane shakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene, she is the gatekeeper of gibe,    a cement-gray song    edged and pocked in grassy fields, a frock of scarlet over her eye, her own…

test

(A small, and still isolated, incident in New York shows what can happen if authentic authority in social relations has broken down to the point where it cannot work any longer even in its derivative, purely functional form. A minor mishap in the subway system—the doors on a train failed to operate—turned into a serious…