Poetry

There’s at least another being being you you may / may not have met. You know the theft and that free pass driving the already raging raging mad, scary as scarefest movies like by Stephen King when tombs thrust up from roiling mud in storms obligatory to the Big Reveal. But. No one sees them…

for Grace This is the shed against which you leantat the end of the field, the edge of the world—this, the darkness only half meantin which you feared that fear lay curled This is the crazy, rickety doorof the shed, blue as the summer skybut rough as the autumn sea on the shore,the door that…

When you collapsed the first timeat the dinner table, you fellnot like a hero in Homer, not likea great tree with a concussive thumpthat raises a dust cloud that blindsthe battling soldiers inside itso they can’t tell enemies from friends—but implodinglike a tall building shaken at its foundationthen crumbling as if made of spackle,as if…

Poetry WorkshopPrinceton, 1980 We had water fights at home,she said of the subject of homewhen it stuck its big headawkwardly into the roomand sat down. We others at the tablegazed at it, at her—this mousy senior who looked thirteenwith her pale frail body,bumps for breasts, and hair dull brown.She hadn’t said a word all term….

The worst thing that could happen did.She had a little girl who died.They took his parents while he hid.Your wife committed suicide. The guards raped him with a broom.He was beaten and left for dead.She woke to someone in the room.Then he was on her in the bed. The man seemed nice but he was…

Jagged are names and not our creatures.                       —Veronica Forrest-Thomson i wish i had a better name to be called by like you might call a dog at a     lake and she would surely turn& i could eat your name for days: i would gladly bow my head o as the     ploughman to the plough& become the machine…

Author’s Note: The speaker of the poems in The Golden Abacus is alynched man. As his body decays, animals, the wind, carry the body todifferent parts of the world. What isn’t carried away seeps into the earthand travels back in time as it mixes with the earth and stone. He, thebody, constantly transforms and speaks…

      Great Crested Grebes It is spring—let us call it spring—where February tips the wings of March with whitened skies; here, where this dance of birdsis the slowest, kindest measure, the arc and rainbow of their mirroringa graceful shimmer and a bright display. The water and reflection askno question of themselves. Headshake, head turn. He dives…