Poetry

If I get religious for a minute, it will be to keep termswith the bewildered caul of being thirteen, surrounded by the dead. What used topeek through the roof, never so much stroking string things and eating afterlifebiscuits, as making sound like a wonky piano dragging its broken leg in an interminable circleof Sundays. I…

after Issa I think it’s enough just to sit and meditate, heedlessof the needs of others close to us and oftheir perpetual demands that seem to sap thestrength from us. My doorway and the morning deware all I need to make my day, and thatis where I’ll plan to be. And if that marksme misanthropic,…

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

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 bikelast seen disappearing into the beautiful sunset. Now I remember the…

The cookies his neighbors brought by             didn’t taste like pity— at my father’s house              for the first time, after, the locks broken into, now new, when cross             the street comes a neighbor, cookies shrouded             in tinfoil, a plate I need not return.             How long had the pair kept vigil out the window             for someone to set foot here so they…

Because there’s no end to cruelty,                    Lyle ties half a brick                                        to a hen’s foot, climbs the ladder up the water tower                    where waits Tony—together,                                        they toss their weighted hens into space: the flung chicken                    that charts its course                                        across clear air, fans its wings and flaps a few feet                    with all the glory of a crippled                                        helicopter, thereby…

Like grass in rain,my dead grow at an amazing rate. Meet me,won’t you, I’ve managed to lose the key. Death, you’ve outdoneyourself. The lawn a little lake.

When Shirley Weems submarines her Barbiein the shallows, spooking the catfishwhile her brother and me sit on upturned bucketswith cane poles on our side of the pondnot bothering anybody, I notehow the light around Shirley seems so rosy,all a-twinkle with its ownself-contained Shirley music. I pick a dirt clodI don’t think contains a rock, but…

A basket in the shape of a sunflower— still hanging on your bedroom wall. You made it in school. You loved it so muchyou wouldn’t stop making it. Or couldn’tstop. We don’t agree, on what you said.But I was your favorite. I thought, What kind of boymakes such a basket? Professional looking, alltight and golden,…