I had only recently been set free—not from prison, but from something akin to it, a facility just as mean with a warden of a different sort. It could have been said of me that I was now out walking the streets. That’s what could have been said. In truth I was at home, glued…
In which the receding sea makes Black Beach a mirror and I’m given another sky, where the green glass like a lozenge floats—rubbed rough and soft— and I feel after a long month of worry the sea reminding the shard: you’re sand. I roll the glass clean between my hands, dip it into a tidal…
Now my father cannot remember the name of the war he fought in seventy-some years ago. When I remind him, he becomes belligerent about a war that never really ended, and one that could start again. Not Korea, I know that much, son! It’s the war that starts with an M. To try and correct…
A baby green anole in the bathtub grips porcelain while I shower. Petrified survivalists, both, we drip. Used to stillness in downpours, it moves only when I pluck its body into my hands and bend a gentle cage. I’m saving you from me, I say. Soaked. A prehistoric face pokes between thumbs, a spell on…
Written in response to works in Description de l’Egypte From point A to point B the longest distance is travelled by a financier driven by his craving for adventure In the archive of the escapade the frontispiece shows Alexandria framed by charioteers city-states to the east and west a parade around the ruins (The ouroboros represents infinity but…
The scent of mimosas and cured algae at the nape of my neck attracts no one but me. The evening’s ammonic light, busy with free electrons, rinses the curtains to ash. I finger damp calico at my calf and wonder if anyone will be gentle to me. Softened by sweat, the calico fissures secret folds…
It will not wait for eggs to hatch, or fruit to ripen. Won’t wait for your coffee to cool, bread to rise, or garden to produce. It won’t wait for your grasp to be firmer, or your loneliness to leave you. Won’t wait for you to make friends, or friends to make you. It will…
Watching it move up the valley in its plentitude between the mountains and me, the rain soaking into each particle of soil, glistening on the tip of each leaf, like the old myth of a god who sees our every thought and deed— impossible, but why not, if rain can do this? Rain: one thing…
All winter, I sent letters to old friends turned strangers, ghosts, representations of other eras, statues & facades. I spoke of sobriety & struggle. I spoke of fatherhood & a new masculine energy tended in the intimacy of a circle of other initiated men. Who am I trying to impress? My teenage son calls everybody…
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