Poetry

Sometimes when I’m reading, I’m distracted by the invisible book underneath the book I’m actually reading and the problem is this: it’s better. It’s like the superball under the couch that your fingertips barely brush: the slightest contact and it’s gone, gliding easily away, because its form is nearly perfect, there, a sphere in the…

Reminds me of early winter—field dressed, dangling from a porch girder like an upside-down garland of roses, no longer animal or drifting hole in a snow-blazed moor. How is it the body knows it deserves the ground before the clouds? The noose almost giving in? Suddenly thawed, dropped in its own shadow, held: un-mothered, sucked…

El Negro de Banyoles tugged the hem of his orange loincloth to save Europe from shame. Storm clouds darkened the gallery skylights. Bruegel’s blind man led a parade of blind men into a ditch as a student sketched a copy at her easel. After the war, Vietnamese beat cradles, tools, and kettles from spent artillery…

Yep. She fell running across the open space. It wasn’t her fault. It’s just One more thing that happened. Knee bleeding, She wouldn’t get picked for the team. None of us understood, of course. We stood there, looking and looking. I’ve read that in this earth we bring forth wind As if soughing, that we…

Near the end of the course, in that part of the hour Reserved for questions, a silence fell on the class When the girl who’d been quiet all semester Raised her hand to ask if anyone there besides her Believed in heaven. An embarrassed silence While each of us wondered why she hadn’t chosen To…

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…

You have been away too long. For pleasure. On business. You are coming home and the almanac predicts heat waves, hurricanes, other unlikelihoods. The old bar in our town is serving seven cocktails for the price of six. The deck is open. Pleasure. You are coming home with your pregnant girlfriend whom no one has…