Poetry

The love rose in my heart has wilted The love bug The news on the transistor A nice man with a ponytail says It’s understandable If you wanted to leave here for there They were burying the evidence Structurally Boys in prison cells And outside the kids play stretcher One of them was dying Between…

jolie might not be one of your color colony dates but I know just what you, calm to coordination, might say.   these luminous treasures before me might not be at brink of what’s poisonous but pollen down the river like women we lost passes like a morning cooking a mother long-lived and radiant where…

The faces changing in the rooms’ changing light were just the beginning of stories, unwritten, untold, hardly imagined, whose flickering hid promises of the expected, of loves, of works to come, deeper in the plot, and the edge of thinking pressed against the heart like an argument, its rupture, loss of blood, the near-death scene,…

One night you lay half in the dark Holding a framed picture And studied your granddaughters’ faces By the light of the reading lamp Whispering their names to yourself As you tapped each face with your finger And kept your focus steady As the beam’s illumination Worried about the shadow That would cross their faces…

Don’t get up, don’t give me that talk about I’m sorry and Look at the woods how beautiful the woods are when the snow flits through those holes I punched in the treetops, said God.                 God said, I don’t care if your knees get muddy, I don’t care if your dinner burns,                        …

I’ve set my mind on You who don’t set your mind on earthly things what have you become now You’re here and I’ve a mind to You who set like an angel cake strawberries that I’m sure for that I hope for when You set your mind on you’re sure sweet what I’ve become now…

Limited, the body’s vocabulary               cannot always say        what it feels, what it wants, what             it is.                     Unendurable,                                          this voicescrape, a song bird                              lashed to my throat—                                                                Where can I escape                                                      from thy spirit?                                            Where can I flee from…

What light in the sky to leave, what flags through town, their white Q’s. How I was   as I had been has nothing against captains, with distance between an awkward door   & fence, in what appear to be the stars in a month in this string of deadly months.   My movement upends,…

Boats in the front yard! Blue tarps enduring the stare of the winter sun hollow as clouds that have been emptied everywhere. Air flowing in defiance of Heraclitus, that you can breathe twice, and lose shingles from any direction. Bottles in the window sparkle with the names of defunct institutions and entrepreneurs. Purple and green…