Poetry

1 my eyes are as big and Grimm as china saucers but this is no fairytale. i do my daily doings hurried to purposeful distraction, a couple of snits or fits if things work out—anything to keep my muddling mind off those kith among those missing if i’m lucky the headlines will be so outrageous…

A tang approaches, like the smell of snow. Illness like a color deepens— pale gray, thick-in-a-cloak gray, secret coat silk, and finally the weight of rough pelts heaped on the bed. The last enchantment of the day is tearing pages out of a book. The paper soft and thin, like falling asleep (a hand backstage…

Passing the pears over the electronic scanner, she says These are beautiful. Look at the markings! And: I don’t know the story of where they’re from. But I believe they are just right. And passing the figs: So complex, what’s on the inside. Everything worthwhile has a kind of mystery. I don’t bother with it…

A space to rise in, made from what falls, from the very mass it’s cleared from, cut, carved, chiseled, fluted or curved into a space there is no end to at night when the stained glass behind the altar could be stone too, obsidian, or basalt, for all the light there is.   At night,…

Anger doesn’t catch the light like laughter, but with my friend it seems to crowd him, seems to complicate his neck and jaw. It’s not just that. It’s made him fat. We’ve only walked two blocks and he’s wheezing when we reach Walgreens. A wind-fixed scent of diesel passes. I hate my job, he says,…

1 I was hired to finish interiors in Cloverdale but I didn’t know how: how to pry open the zinc-tabbed five-gallon tub: how to slide out the balsa paddle without leaving a maze of white dots on oak parquet: how deep and long to dip the bristle: perhaps it was a problem of language: paint…

As if hallucinations made of words could hallucinate themselves beyond the words, out of the books, out of the newest on display behind the window, and the ones on tables in the gloom or ranged on shelves in different sections; out of the pages building to betrayal, out of the spectral signatures of doom of…

In the scene where the cow jumps over the moon the little dog laughs with his mouth wide open. Comforted by the same thirty words he’s heard fifty times the boy leans sideways into his mother. Before this they’d walked by the water. Before that they’d spread their blanket on the grassy bank, and before…

The sandhogs who blasted the Lincoln Tunnel jerry-rigged an escarpment a quarter-mile down but it buckled at riptide and one journeyman was sucked into the air pocket, up through the lattice, through the ooze under the Hudson, to surface in daylight—how the hell did he remember to drop his ninety pound jute sack and let…