Poetry

The sky was low. His head was a vase of sorrows he wanted to fill with blossoms. He stepped into the House of Wigs. The saleslady said, “Try this one on. It’s called the Mind of Fire. It turns ashes into flame. Prometheus was wearing it, they say, when he was punished by the Gods…

And shall we describe the beautiful bike? It was a beautiful color the beautiful bike. What ever happened to the beautiful bike? The beautiful bike rode off into the beautiful sunset. Not by itself, surely. Who was pedaling the beautiful bike? You, you were the one pedaling the beautiful bike last seen disappearing into the…

to Sleep   I’ll count backward from a thousand till my teeth begin to grind, down to zero, where the digits tilt and swivel in a ring around the racing eye of the tornado I’m made of tonight. Left alive, I am an opening too wide, much too much gaping sky to slip behind the…

My hair was not on fire and the fabric of my shirt didn’t rub me the wrong way. It was the best day of my life when I entered the monastery. My heart was not on fire but enclosed by a high wall and covered with new grasses for the white cow who had taken…

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—…