Poetry

  • Fassbinder

    He couldn’t wait to finish a film before he started the next, forty-three total plus the nine-hundred-thirty-minute tv series; refused to commit to any one lover, man or woman; fucked his actors in Munich hotels and Morocco châteaus; left a trail of broken hearts, one ex-wife, four wrecked Lamborghinis, two suicides; popped pills to stay…

  • Tree of life

    There’s something casual about maple leaves. They’re almost mittens, in the first place. They refuse to stand for the national anthem. And when it rains, as it rained last night, a rain I listened to on the floor, a rain as delicate as a shoplifter, they’re moved by each raindrop and resist each raindrop, creating…

  • Wishbone

    Psychic rib soaped clean, skeleton key to every lock in this house. Heartless, this place, as I’ve come to christen it. The wish then abandoned in the soap dish, near the wet bone china. Last Christmas saw us shivering at Lake Erie, stroking the battered nose of a dinghy. Abandoned. Bone- clean, its hull scoured…

  • September Song

    One moment you were tossing me a football in the empty field behind your house and the next I was getting clobbered by a linebacker and run over by a safety. Forty years vanished in that instant when the pigskin touched my hands, which are still soft, and the defensive end straightened me out with…

  • More Weight

    They’d take her child away, unless he shed more weight. But every time he cried, she fed. More weight. My little niece too light, and snow not dense enough, I squeezed myself behind her on the sled: more weight. So thin her body cannot warm itself, she picks at the meager salad on her plate….

  • Baby Handle

    Samurai sword-fighting lesson, Tokyo We’re using the iaito or “practice sword” now               as opposed to the shinken or “live sword” which looks as though it can cut through lampposts                             and is “hungry for the flesh of its owner,” says smiling Sakaguchi-san through a translator,               which is why I’m getting lots of unintentional laughs when I…

  • How Music Is Made

    for Chris You make it and I wonder about it listening to what you navigate and sound in the midst of the orchestra with your clarinet enchanted—though you may not be—by what’s around, wrapping you in a cloak, complete or torn sometimes embroidered and elaborate, gold-edged while I peer down at you from a box…

  • Approaching

    What we have is shaped, layered, planned, like the twig of a bending sprout covered with earth so it can grow, the buds predicted by the shoot that we can see and understand, that we can seldom do without, that only we can ever know in all its style, within the root. Some want to…

  • The Toothache

    The toothache drills a hole to the suitcase filled with singed clothes of the woman who died in a crash. Further inside, a shelf I made when I left my first country, plank I put myself on with my wooden doll and wooden dog.