Poetry

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,…

The woman in the next cubicle: fat ass, the man on the train: fat ass, the director of the nonprofit where I work (though always dieting): fat ass and a bitch. Me on my fourth cookie: fat ass. My mom in her chair: fat ass. My dad in his chair (reclining): fat ass, and my…

In Heaven ants are the doormen to the flies I climbed out of one butchered ballroom into another climbing out of my half-life into my new life on earth My brother right behind me Home The ants are a straight line of suicides showing us the way out of here The flies are suicides with…