Poetry

They are, my love, a cross between Einstein’s and wheat fields. Twin mustaches. Strands of sugar right before the cotton candy is spun. Astroturf welcome mats. The cellophane grass of Easter baskets. Caterpillar chia pets. Brambles and squiggles. Seaweed strewn on shore. Spiky cloud tufts that lift up when I show you my slip or…

morning dropped a gentler rain after wine and gin encasing the unseen    unmentionable    as clouds deftly encase wasps-in-a-shroud    and stay aloft    without a string unmentionable    even after headstrong long-gone spins of wind (go go little gallop of smoke    lithe cantering steam come come wild unthreadings    anything not to envision his fingers pressed against…

For a long time, walking it,           we sang Woody Guthrie songs, This land is your land, this land is my land,           and got along with whoever came our way, although, to be honest,           few came back and those who did had downcast eyes,           a sort of sad sack hangdog look to…

What goat goes roistering through the bracken of my doubt? What lantern lures me from the cave I could have withered in? The road is long and knotted, dear, from the credulous dire country of boyhood to your honest kiss. We pass the tool and die shop’s grind and click. You make a song of…

for Esbjörn Svensson (1964-2008) This ocean: simmer of handed-down fishscales & salt spreading from here to whatever’s after like soup spilled on a transcontinental plate. Here, starfish pucker up with Xs where their eyes should be. Here, in the sweet effervescence of nearsightedness, the ocean simplifies in its own gravity. Half-done shells are split then…

The dancer’s dying words: get my swan costume ready. No one stirs from her bed. Elsewhere a hollowed pharaoh lies with fingers and toes capped in golden thimbles as a sandstorm thickens outside. A human-headed bird evacuates his body by day and at night returns to nest in his emptied stomach. The purpose of mummification…

I. It came in like a quiet boat at night. We still don’t know who sent it or why. Some days it makes us shake. We kept on cooking for each other and bathing ourselves. We looked at children but the music of Chopin always replaced the sight of them. In its coming, it took…

She accepts all invitations, asking me what else she’s supposed to do. It’s all you can do, I tell her, apart from staying home every night, which is where I was when she phoned from the party, the kind I used to frequent as part of my own new life, but no longer do. I…

They thought the job would be more musical: Rainbows and trumpets. They’d burst through clouds of marble streaked with flame and offer blinding demonstrations of the ontological proof of God. People would look up and say “Ineffable!” Instead, they swooped through the mall calling Ashley? Pammy? fished Mrs. Baines’ wedding ring from the drain again,…