Poetry

  • The Leopard

    She feels the shape of another animal three trees ahead, & raises her left front paw. Dew trembles on each blade of grass as a snake uncoils among the leaves. She’s a goddess in a world mastered by repetition & unearthly cadence, pacing off light hidden in darkness. She eases down her right paw, slow…

  • The Tip

    That he left it behind when he left. That it has three teeth. That it might be the horny snout-end of a defunct dragon. That I remember him, early on, putting it in and turning it when it           broke off. That he looked at me and said, Uh-oh. She doesn’t want us to get…

  • To a Braying Donkey

    In this thin air, your voice carries for a quarter mile, grating like a train, and I relearn the ancient lesson—epic sadness travels. Your braying turns everything tragic. The face I shave: crossroads of dolor. The bed I make: labor in lostness. The scrambled eggs at the end of my fork: another bite of a…

  • Ode to Your Eyebrows

    They are, my love, a cross between Einstein’s and wheat fields. Twin mustaches. Strands of sugar right before the cotton candy is spun. Astroturf welcome mats. The cellophane grass of Easter baskets. Caterpillar chia pets. Brambles and squiggles. Seaweed strewn on shore. Spiky cloud tufts that lift up when I show you my slip or…

  • Agitation: Wake

    morning dropped a gentler rain after wine and gin encasing the unseen    unmentionable    as clouds deftly encase wasps-in-a-shroud    and stay aloft    without a string unmentionable    even after headstrong long-gone spins of wind (go go little gallop of smoke    lithe cantering steam come come wild unthreadings    anything not to envision his fingers pressed against…

  • The Road to Hell

    For a long time, walking it,           we sang Woody Guthrie songs, This land is your land, this land is my land,           and got along with whoever came our way, although, to be honest,           few came back and those who did had downcast eyes,           a sort of sad sack hangdog look to…

  • The Big Thing

    What goat goes roistering through the bracken of my doubt? What lantern lures me from the cave I could have withered in? The road is long and knotted, dear, from the credulous dire country of boyhood to your honest kiss. We pass the tool and die shop’s grind and click. You make a song of…

  • Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins

    for Esbjörn Svensson (1964-2008) This ocean: simmer of handed-down fishscales & salt spreading from here to whatever’s after like soup spilled on a transcontinental plate. Here, starfish pucker up with Xs where their eyes should be. Here, in the sweet effervescence of nearsightedness, the ocean simplifies in its own gravity. Half-done shells are split then…