Poetry

In the beginning, I thought a great deal about death and sunlight, et cetera, cramming each syllable that I could cram into the seconds and brackets allotted me, all for the memoir that wouldn’t be written, all for the movie that wouldn’t be made. Look at the way I ran after you, arms stirring dust…

1. A cage can be a body: heart in the nightquieted slightly; mind, a stopped top.Clock spring set. Hand in motion.The fact of the hollowed nothing head. How did we come to this? Inch by inch.I was born, borrowed from the beast;I was now property in a countrywhere chain reigns—the empire city of I. 2….

Now and then, you heard the copters Flying in search of inmates who’d escaped. Mostly, though, it was quiet. At night, outside, The cats would fight and fuck and knock shit down, The couple next door would simmer in heat Or bitterness. Sometimes you saw them, In the window-glass, appearing Like quarter-moons through mist. There…

At first you were famously not good at it. You were coaxed, given cocoa, lectured a bit. On the morning of a journey they would gather you up And bundle you into the station wagon, asleep Or pretending sleep, among pillows and soft voices, While the car made its turnings through darkened places. Later you…

We live alone together except for five cats, yet sometimes the only way to be truly alone is to run away together. Away from the computer, e-mail, Facebook, the cell phone, the land line, meetings, the endless list of things to be done— that no matter how many I cross off, keeps growing so that…

Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…

It surprises me that immigrants brought rootstock of roses in their luggage. Scots roses, spinosissima, Eglanteria, the briar rose that spread out into New England: bits of thorny fragrance that smelled like home. Mostly they were at least as tough as the people who carted them here. I can understand seeds of grain, of vegetables,…

In the single room of a bathtub, humming “Love Me Tender” to hear a sullen human voice. Then after, fainting in slow motion to the tile. Succumbing to steam and waking, on my own, drowsy as a rose. Mailing a letter and waiting, empty, beside a hornet’s thumb-small home, fit inside the lip of the…

Let me practice silence with you. You have an extra room in your hut and a wooden balcony overlooking a ravine of moonlight. I can sleep in this bare corner, on the floor-planks with a blanket and a stone for a pillow. We can work on our separate projects in each other’s shadow. Let us…