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In this house that is not mine I hear a home knocking at a door left unlocked for years only the days knew to come and go as they please. At the top of some ridge it has found me with my walls building solitude out of trees. At the nadir of some work it…
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing, On TV the Bizarre Foods host leans over a rickety market stall in Bangkok. He picks at the toothpick bones of a sparrow, licks his lips and…
Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man—wow—I love how The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning His hip to the right, kind of messy Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle And a hip cocked in the…
We are all intruders here though we fool ourselves this late winter day, carving a place on the banks to anchor our heels. We stretch over the water, hoping to slip onto the wings of a Great Blue Heron but afraid to get caught in the trap of reeds, twisting in the…
There’s a preponderance of dog shit in Paris but no one says so, attracted to its other, finer qualities. If people were stepping in that much crap in Detroit you’d never hear the end of it. Motown my ass, they’d say, without so much as a backward glance at the Miracles, the Temptations. They might…
has become one knotted rope one breath of cabbage soup one foot on the cobblestone— a thousand banners—no—one flag flapping its red letters into a satin tatter because this is the century of slivers and scraps—beauty of the dustbin—the crowd knows that nothing good can follow from that other prettiness —the slick summer palaces of…
It’s only a pile of sticks in the woods. My sisters go to bed after me. It’s only a pile of sticks arranged counterclockwise, like a funnel. My sisters don’t know I’m really clear-headed when my mother stands outside the window. My teacher is scared of someone standing where she can’t see, someone really there,…
Codices, caxtons, concordances— your books, dusted, rearranged, reshelved. But it’s what falls out of them most fascinates: feathers, letters, fortunes, tickets, baseball, post- and birth- day cards stashed among the savored or as-yet-unfinished pages. What would get you back to that one? A prison term perhaps, or the long convalescence you have sometimes thought you…
Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…
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