Poetry

Country Song

The rednecks are loathsome I know maybe because they’ve hardly been anywhere or because they don’t wonder if there’s a God or because they’re too busy wearing boots the ends of which could be knives and cotton T-shirts the sleeves of which maybe they think were invented to wrap cigarettes in and hair that’s so…

The Census, 2010

Named after the Romantic poet who swam the Grand Canal, The bewildered surfer lives with his girl, his boy in a duplex by the shore. But the house isn’t a teepee in a field like where he grew To a state with his mother and father and sibs in northern forests Bewildered, though now he…

Hither & Yon

Presto! Vortices that come off birds from a passing shadow to a developing storm. As soon as light hits the water, they’re in the zone, low in the shallows, waiting out the night, the paralysis of the icy laws of fact. Amphibian between being, non-being, who does not know the number of his fingers? Or…

Sorrow

What else to do with sorrow but to buy her a drink, walk it over to her table, set it down in front of her (Sorrow is a woman, always has been, always will), and say the only pick-up line you’ve ever heard that works, “Drink this until I start to look handsome.” And she’ll…

Heisenberg

We interfere with what we know by knowing it. We interfere with what we do by doing it. We interfere with what we love by loving it. I guess you could say we’re the causes of our own loneliness. We interfere with what we watch by watching it. We interfere with what we write by…

Missing Jerry Tang

It’s been over a year since he was last seen near the park’s boathouse, where birdwatchers congregate for coffee and small children lob oversized chunks of stale bread at the ducks, igniting and re-igniting their squabble. Fluorescent flyers–Missing husband and father of two, 40 years old, seizure disorder— have been replaced with more recent sightings;…

Provide

A man and a woman in bed at night breathe in, breathe out earthly pleasure, crunch of red clay beneath my shoes when I take the gravel path past the old dairy through the hillside pasture. Midwinter provides another meaning, by which I mean that other, more elusive, pleasure I know when I see, first,…

On a Line by W. H. Auden

to address mystery without being mysterious, never expecting anyone to know, speaking only for yourself but not be self-centered, conducting yourself as if your work mattered, never naming what you love, believing in truth– as who doesn’t?–and not trying to say something, not contenting yourself with saying nothing, to bow down, to hate nothing and…