Poetry

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…

Wind takes your hair like a hooligan owl and leaves a deep pocket of dusk in your scalp. Love without pride is a love with no end. You keep calling me in to fill up your head, but the mutinous dust of the dead yellow field says better not listen to a thing with a…

It seems farfetched, I know, but when we tethered toy horses in the lea of the patio the moon wept like a candle, and the dawn when it came crept along the dusty panhandle. Best not to worry the truth like that yarn about Turner strapped to the mast of the little ice age, better…

In the nick of school busses. Office slacks. The rest of the game: Welcome Home, Girl. Critical objects to fragment and pony, sure—but I got this softshoe doublestep down. Books all memorized. You rolled some tardy & went fish-eyed in the cut: a tired, trifling air kiss bye-bye. But that’s the providence of maybe. The…

In Leeson Street? we find ourselves in a Georgian chapel of ease,? an elite mass rock, in an Irish lexicon,? in a credo unravelling, in ambivalent government attire, we stand, genuflect, stand again and disperse,? miming handshakes and the bluster of concern. What stains our hands— March as before whipped in a narrow light— as…

As Written by Mikhail Bulgakov Little cartographer, little sparrow, little bathtub sitting upon clawed feet, little aquarium cracked and housing a dead crow, little anvil, little hones holding large sickles, little swan of the question mark neck choking on flakes of black snow, little water truck nose-down in a gully with a rusty tongue, a…