Poetry

Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…

It surprises me that immigrants brought rootstock of roses in their luggage. Scots roses, spinosissima, Eglanteria, the briar rose that spread out into New England: bits of thorny fragrance that smelled like home. Mostly they were at least as tough as the people who carted them here. I can understand seeds of grain, of vegetables,…

In the single room of a bathtub, humming “Love Me Tender” to hear a sullen human voice. Then after, fainting in slow motion to the tile. Succumbing to steam and waking, on my own, drowsy as a rose. Mailing a letter and waiting, empty, beside a hornet’s thumb-small home, fit inside the lip of the…

Let me practice silence with you. You have an extra room in your hut and a wooden balcony overlooking a ravine of moonlight. I can sleep in this bare corner, on the floor-planks with a blanket and a stone for a pillow. We can work on our separate projects in each other’s shadow. Let us…

The body is at home in time and space and loves things, how they come and go, and such distances as it might cross or place between the things it loves, and its own touch. But for you, soul, whom the body bred in error like some weird pearl, everything is wrong. Space is stone,…

Under the smallest bentback cricket leg rotates this enormous planet attesting to a cosmic order, surface washed in light supposed to heal all wicked men: paralytics, lepers, those whose mouths are packed with pebbles, blind crows instead of stomachs, telltale signs of shame. In a field, a black hood over my head, I stood and…

Sure, there was the giant knife, and the quick, fat slice of cake in his right hand, but what always surprised me was the night into which he stole. Hard and purring. Luminous and thick. It seemed not a real place— pines and bluffs and crashing waves as if it were a symptom of his…

Wild mint at our door, honeysuckle, fragrant August wind shifting, dying—nectar, salt, all one breath. Dragonflies mating in the greeny shade of the tamarisk, their brief lives unfettered. On the shore tiny green-black mites, terns— and the calligraphic beach grasses yearning with the breeze like a printmaker’s lines. Sand-washed, sun-warmed fragments—“sea glass”: wines tossed—when?—from a…

I know what hills in the distance can do to a boy: they can make him think hills in the distance for the rest of his life. The best thing for you would be to keep your eyes closed at all times, looking for a way out.