Poetry

Osaka   Hard to imagine Basho died here in a rented room above a flower shop in 1694, as I pause today on Dotonbori Street, shoppers brushing past on either side, to gaze at the giant red mechanical crab stretching its legs over the door of the Kani Doraku seafood restaurant, its eye stalks rotating…

1.          Construction When the road was not a road but a flooded mouth of broken teeth husband and wife parked at the spring-swollen dam. Above a chorus of peepers they bickered the radio news unloading their haul: soft pine, tongue, groove. They shouldered the wood under a catchpenny moon. A quarter mile down they filled…

Dear, neither of us has any money. Let’s say we leave that field open, as in we don’t complete the form. I see nothing here says it is required. Maybe this is the other kind of field. Grass, etc. That makes sense to me. Dear, neither of us has any money. Let’s say there’s an…

the horses are filthy in their winter coats grubby and matted manes mended with hay they flicker between snows like medieval orders of spiritual pilgrims; seen and invisible— unseen and real the blizzard continues and the world is the wind your eyes close to slits inside the drift and howl the horses aren’t yours /…

It’s not the shore; it’s the ocean that opens. Devil, make a mountain of me for the water to dwell         against. I became aware of my       methods and the methods changed me. Soldier, you make my body a map on the floor. It’s what the door is for—         hesitation—a hand that wants to be a…

Suspect enthusiasm— having eaten pins before— but that’s what keeps one quiet, that’s what makes one stay. Empty is just the first temporal name after something smaller sat there is gone. Then that space regains its height and wild. Let let lovers be light thoughts, just touch remembered in some not unkind way. It was…

When we looked at the circle, we felt powerless. Earth or fist our hands are bound together    in protest. Bare my throat, I said, in a faceful of sand. I swallowed too much water. The property    is private, the way we’ve come to think of grief as nonviolence, absence,    lack, fasting as an act of…

In the beginning, I thought a great deal about death and sunlight, et cetera, cramming each syllable that I could cram into the seconds and brackets allotted me, all for the memoir that wouldn’t be written, all for the movie that wouldn’t be made. Look at the way I ran after you, arms stirring dust…