Poetry

The road is impassable, a shelf on the side of a mountain the     wind keeps sweeping clear to fill with possessions for the new     year: fresh snow, and the North Country light that Polaris, king of hunger and the shivering animals, king of     branches that snap in the cold, sends as its indifferent     benediction. King…

I can’t sleep. I feel the globe making a rotation, and I’m not supposed to be, but I’m awake for it. I’m at that age when everyone is talking about the kinds of love they’ve been using to get by. It’s a very dark late. The sound of a towel dropping off the rack into…

Picture a city and the survivors: from their windows, some scream. Others walk the wreckage: blood and still more blood coming from the mouth of a girl. This is the same movie playing all over the world: starring everybody who ends up where the action is: lights, cameras, close-ups: that used to be somebody’s leg….

A waxing moon, tail-wind of a return, but to what? Life on the telephone, letters typed on a computer screen which no one needs to file or hide or burn at the storm-center of emergency where there is no coherent narrative. With no accounting of my hours to give black holes gape open in my…

Swear you’ll go as deep as you possibly can, my wife said before I set out on the submarine voyage. I promised her and donned my gear. The paparazzi followed me down, but one by one they drowned. Starfish nibbled at their flesh and little bubbles rose cheerfully, heralding their demise. I was too busy…

He thumbs a corner of Verlaine,            plucks those pages like a dulcimer, even when the train lurches            not looking up from there but pawing at the air for a handhold,            and my God! what a head— stamped from some stuff…

The morning Jacob called us to the field and said he would take us back to the land of his father, Isaac— the one led up the mountain by his father to be bound and knifed and burnt for love of the god of his fathers, I thought, I will not. I would stay, I…

In between “host” and “glint” is ghost. A “hint” will hiss next to “guess.” For example also the virtue of frost is moisture And in icicles, glaciers or in a body’s cooling gestures the centuries pile up. Bone too, keeps a ballad interior. Lacuna if it could speak would be laconic. Winter seethes and wrecks us,…

after Gwendolyn Brooks       I. 1981. When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on barstools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is…