Poetry

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,…

for Little Milton & Charlie Rich Memphis, City of the Dead, City of Sun and blight, Soulsville, rest stop for hell they gone and run off. Tonight I dog you like a broken trombone. Twice I’ve ended here on Union past midnight, brain looted by morphine, the tremolo pinch of train steel across the Frisco…

After gimlets and cosmopolitans, we’re on to sex and its catastrophes, Susan telling about the time she ordered a paycheck’s worth of Italian lingerie. She dressed slowly, she says, feeling only a little ridiculous as she slid one gartered leg across the coffee table. Looking up, her husband asked if she could stop blocking the…

A well-made thought, a coin. It must have been the vista we were after since nobody’s in it. But where was it? It was a clear day, though, look. We must have loved the way it opened out, suggesting some idea, maybe lunch, we thought it led to, without which our life might have been…