Poetry

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…

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through…

Every year they come together like the risen sap of bamboo,? cross cut canes pitch and toss,? all the families waving, in the white laden branches of the pear trees. Hives that once sang like choirs lie against the gable walls? of their churches and schools, tossed in the dust of quarantine,? old tea chests,…

There is nothing for her to hold and everybody knows it. Nothing for her to hold, eight times over. Pieces of her babies, girly, ghostly, float toward her nightly tossing brain. Mom has a gene for dropping dead, but she won’t use it on her misery. God of Anthony, god of the thin good men…

You should have seen the sea in those days, wind smoke and weeping flares washing ashore from the barrios, all those hesitant evacuees, as tarpaulin stretched along Beaufort’s Dyke and our drift nets sailed through the Hebrides. Shuffling in pipe smoke, scribbling a plume of grave longing on the bones of a wax-bright dusk, I…