Poetry

When I hear the young refer to someone as a douche bag, I want to say, You may have never seen a douche bag. They were red rubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’d fill it and hang it high enough so that gravity…I can’t go on, I see my mother’s douche bag, my poor…

And every morning the sun comes up. And the pretty coffee in a cup. And a bird meowing outside in a tree. And, on the ceiling, the water stain of England made sadder by singing in a minor key. The size of a coffin, and full of bees. Shadow on a tractor, mowing the field….

When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting. Your mother is there, and your father is there, and my mother and father, and what they might have thought of each other. And our people—back from our folks, back—are there, and what they might have had to do with each other; if…

So here are the strange feelings that flicker in you or anchor like weights in your eyes. Turn back and you might undo them, the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor…

After Pablo Neruda   This piranha in your poem, this river-missile drawn to flesh I once dangled from a fishing line. I know you won’t believe me, but when I held its flapping body to my ear, it moaned. The piranha moaned, like the medicine man moans of a river he believes is an anaconda,…

For every forest, there is a pig screaming out like a child as the butcher’s knife pops open its throat. For every bucket of pig’s blood, a bucket of rainwater, saved to hydrate a spring garden. For every Amish-horse-and-buggy sign on a country road, a teenager exhales pot smoke into a pillow in her parents’…

In the stories it’s different: grief, like the dark, lifts eventually— a tenderness inside which, with all the clarity of bells when for once they ring like nothing but the ringing bells they are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, like a horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighter than ash…

Before it’s too late—neck-    Grope this life’s most beautiful Monsters until all of this disorder Shapes sacred. Until flocks    Of balloon animals—thousands Of them—drop from the diamond- Blue sky. Purple hippos & clownfish.    Ticks like hubcaps & backpack- Size wolves. A dancer will find A carved-in-butter replica    Of The Garden of Earthly Delights Sprawling the…

Of the many things that he used to say to me, there are two I’m certain of: You taste like a last less-than-long summer afternoon by the shore just before September; and   You’re the kind of betrayal, understand, I’ve been waiting for, all my life. When did remembering stop meaning to be lit from…