Poetry

Theodicy

When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…

Life Study

         Viareggio bus station, Italy He lifts him like they’re wrestlers in the ring or like in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus, only neither of these guys is a hero and both have been drinking all morning—this isn’t the Uffizi and what they’re doing isn’t in a painting: it’s a park, James Taylor’s going to sing tonight…

Poems Describing Someone

May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…

Celestial Room

I remember when I was four a book seemed from heaven and then, when I was eight, it seemed a field.                           * How large the world has become, the thoughts, capable. I wanted to look at that, just that.                           * I thought I would never speak again. But there are books, transformed, and souls that…

The Face of Jesus

I was thinking about why souls have bodies, what can a body do that a soul can’t, and about the Amish or Mennonites, the ones whose children were so sick with the same disease that struck generation after generation, until finally one doctor figured out how to help them. But while he was figuring, he…

Mashups – Liquor Store

Music is one of the first things to go in the general condition of being out of it– you know that when you’re behind the old broadcaster on line at the liquor store and her ringer is a happy snatch of a song that sounds like cutoffs around a keg in Happy Valley, PA, home…

Landscape with Parking Lot

In some corner of this desert plateau, native habitat to the partly run-over soda bottle, freckled with spilled antifreeze and pied patches of putrid something or other, a plastic bag is snagged like a tumbleweed in a perfect cube of hedge. At night, heat radiates off concrete like an exhale of relief in this legendary…

God Loves You

1  God’s image was in the mirror and God’s image was my grief. And lo, I knew I was not loved by Him and wept. And I knew shame. For though I was young, I was not young enough to weep in the face of the Lord who made me. 2  In sorrow, I set…