Poetry

  • Often, Common, Some, and Free

    Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saywe leave that field open, as inwe don’t complete the form. I see nothing heresays it is required.Maybe this is the other kindof field. Grass, etc. That makes sense to me.Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saythere’s an Adirondack chair, the affordable plastic kind.Maybe those are rubber.Maybe…

  • Don’t Think Like the Mountains, They’re Nothing Like the Future

    If only our children were colts, and sensible enough to be good at one     thing.Running. Jumping some. Looking adorable.They would deserve our devotion.Think crepe myrtle, nudged after a brief rain. Think zealots. Think     ocean waves, if we’d enough sense to give them unique personalities.Everywhere you look, willfulness. Bountiful willfulness.And these days it’s the children you see playing…

  • The Fly

    As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night,         swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding, kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the         tea curtain with a misplaced elbow, unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques,         his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings, his…

  • Antidote with Placebo

    Pit yourself against gutted ships, against the lips of those you love the least, against the hollows where quails spend their lives. Do not sleep. Do not take shape. Ambush the soft armies of seas and the singular face of an adjacent cliff. Scream the way everything screams. Find a small longitude to stitch along…

  • A Life

        Better a monosyllabic life than a ragged     and muttered one; let its report be short     and round like a rifle, so that it may hear     its own echo in the surrounding silence.                     —Thoreau A life: pared to the bone. Think of a room with no chair,…

  • Late December

    It’s the day after Christmas a flat gray morning where the rain has fallen on the crooked streets and no one has stolen our newspaper, its headline denouncing the young Nigerian, someone’s devout beloved son who tried to blow up a plane, my own son half asleep on the couch in his Levis and unraveled…

  • Constructing a Religion

    Not the rising sun, but the setting sun. Not the father, but the mother. Not the cross, but the circle, drawn in ink, not blood. The Word inhabited but unspoken, like a bell unrung. A cathedral of the mind, gray and cool as Time, with doors so tall and heavy that I must tug and…