Poetry

  • Ukulele

    The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts.No one hides a Tommy gun in its case.No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the namegift that came here, while Portuguese historians translatejumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If you have a cigar…

  • Even the Gods

    Even the gods misuse the unfolding blue. Even the gods misread the windflower’s nod toward sunlight as consent to consume. Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Still, you envy the horse that draws their chariot. The wilting mash of air alone keeps you from scaling Olympus with gifts of dead or dying things…

  • Demolition Derby

    Amped-up grid lights growl starsonto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace,car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’rebleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselvesfor being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugarfrom our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air,our guts, the gears chunking and purring, the stands…

  • The Body Is a Big Sagacity

    is another thing Nietzsche saidthat hits me as pretty specious,if not entirely untrue,while sitting in my car in the Costcoparking lot, listening to the BalletMécanique of metal buggies shrieking as each super, singular, and self-containedwisdom of this Monday morning rumblesits jumbo packs of toilet paper and Diet Cokeup the sidewalk. So count me a Despiserof…

  • The Visions of Sane Persons

    I shall speak of the tendency among sane and healthy persons to see images flash unaccountably into existence.                      —Francis Galton   This is a tale not of science but of blue. Some say this heat is the worst in history, but history is huge and I doubt it has never been hotter across the Northern…

  • Deep Lane

    I’m resting on a bench in the cemeterywhile Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy traceover the slopes of grass, but we can’t stay long, since it’s a day I need to go into the city,and when I stand up suddenly my left leg’s half a footlower than my right, because I’ve stepped into the sunken, newly…

  • The Birds and the Bees

    When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legsturning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A manwill come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleagueat an office party, or a lifeguard on a spit of sand—…

  • 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…