Poetry

Not really knowing the difference between herons and cranes, that summer we named the two birds that came to Boehmke’s Cove (which were almost surely not cranes but herons because of the way they flew with their heads drawn in close to their bodies, and for their topknot crests of feathers) “Stephen Crane” and “Hart…

Old woman on the rocks you look so happy. I’ve been dying to tell someone I have no past but we share no common lexis for that. And anyway you don’t need to know more— everyone is eager to be empty. This is a nice breeze so let’s just sit here a while growing fonder…

This subway map reminds me of the colored stripes on hospital floors that guide us to recovery or dead ends (I lift my glass to the Amber line), or the spacious room that overlooks a beautiful parking lot where the roofs of the cars are like tiles you’ll be walking on in the same sunshine,…

He’s made me smaller, taken fingernails and spoken words that leave me awake on the outskirts of this town where plum trees don’t give and dogs, chained to their houses with rope, are shot through with silver. His sisters battered down the door with a hatchet and a telescope they bought at a yard sale….

Some things are damned to erupt like wildfire, windblown, like wild lupine, like wings, one after another leaving the stone-hole in the greenhouse glass. Peak bloom, a brood of blue before firebrand. And, though it is late in the season, the bathers, also, obey. One after another, they breathe in and butterfly the surface: mimic…

what is this daisy doing to the ground it is goring what am I doing to this daisy I am saving this mean black daisy mine into dye or stippling crippling the country its great love landing in a cloud of sorts of course a malodor clot going strangle the singers who will not sing…

You’re not still casting the insides of things, are you? —Question asked of Rachel Whiteread in response to her sculpture “Embankment” To see a thing whitely with edge pour concrete, plaster, polyethylene.     Yes, a cast water bottle.     Yes, a staircase and a chair.         Yes, the space underneath the bed where I…

Thunder rode glories out towns thin things   Had we perceptual capacities enough & & lime   Had lived here sixteen ten times atomica ten times pieces ten times the situation ten glories ten slender life-giving stories   Story time tuned to a circular crucifix score   Fixed score scores more

Lie down long beside your confirmation number And be my garden The orders of magnitude will mount             And thunder past us This is the part When you put everything away                 Where no one can tell The difference between the wind And a human being             The haze has migrated to the other eye…