Poetry

It’s the day after Christmas a flat gray morning where the rain has fallen on the crooked streets and no one has stolen our newspaper, its headline denouncing the young Nigerian, someone’s devout beloved son who tried to blow up a plane, my own son half asleep on the couch in his Levis and unraveled…

We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to my childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges.? This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap? under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa.? But moving up the trail, we caught a…

In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed, the mushroom scent lingers. As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale. As a person who’s once loved completely, a country once conquered, does not release that stunned knowledge. They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels, clownish puffballs. Lichens…

My friends who were and aren’t dead are coming back to say hello. There’s a wall that they write things on.? They have status updates. What are you doing right now? For the most part, they seem successful. They have children, which I can only imagine. The hairy kid we called Aper, I haven’t heard?…

I am on my knees again, mop without stick, over old fir trees turned into flooring. A thought stood once in the middle, near the cookstove, left heel and right heel. Left hand and right hand, I wash around it. Thought without handle, thought without hands, without lemons or Serengeti. One breath, another, one corner…

Scarcely had our break-of-day whale-watching trip on Faxafloi Bay been canceled because of high waves than our house-minding daughter would weigh in with the news her dog, the selfsame stray we took in fifteen years ago, has died. She insists on digging Toto’s grave hard by Oscar’s, there on the crest of the leach field….

Loud enough for Stentor himself, the waiting-room video recycles hour after hour the same weary sequence reciting the grim signs of glaucoma, advising Restasis to increase tear production, praising the League of the Legally Blind, which is what I am in one eye, the bad eye, as if it had done something wrong and needed…

“Da molte stele mi vien questa luce” —Dante I. Sea Road, No Map I said to you I will die if I stay and you said Jesus we’ll die anyway. You spoke as if I did not exist. What world would have me? A ship.? She moves me on from impossible Ireland, the wrack of…

Death, in the orderly procession of random events on this gradually expiring planet crooked in a negligible arm of a minor galaxy adrift among millions of others bursting apart in the amnion of space, will, said Socrates, be either a dreamless slumber without end or a migration of the soul from one place to another,…