Poetry

The yellow eye and needle beak of that black bird, because the tree is swaying—look, it’s saying I, I’m staying. Reports from the south and west come far worse, where of course they understand the danger, who chose danger in that form and not another, though it must seem unfair, disproportionate, how that balance of…

Stabbed by the heron’s shadow as the bird planed above me on these flats, I am back in Taylorville, 1958, scratching the low-tide mud with Linc and his father, the Kaiser. “No future in oysters, boy.” The old man’s advising one or both of us to stay in school or else enlist in the Navy:…

With my jade and pebbled hide, my fleas and magnificent talons, Why have I long cooped under this iron bridge in Kittanning on the Allegheny? See the green-bottle flies over the giant catfish rotting on a rock, General Armstrong’s hoofed men swarming down a hillside with smoke. I want you to notice how thin my…

Color of a two-day new bruise, pored and faintly fuzzed like the pad of a dog’s paw. Skin so thin faucet water risks rubbing through to moony fruit, the shape and pitless-centered weight of testes.             No stone, too malleable             so, not a drupe. Dropped, it wobbles to find plumb center, comes to rest on star-shaped…

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.” —Edward Abbey The horizon gutted, skinned, unfurled and dried like a diamondback, no secrets, no secret sea cave stash, so evident it all seems invisible: fissures in the orange San Andreas, smoking asphalt on a runaway go-cart, 100% clear…

A hairy hand with mouth and eyes,       I would say, and was that scuttling, that side-stepping jig, the furred upper legs bent at the joint in demi-plié, was it       scurry or whisk, romance or menace, this tuft half-hid behind our garden shed door? Her dragline ensnarls like a gossamer kiss       to my thinking, she’s thinking,…

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, The Art of Falconry 1. Of the oil gland . . . Of the down . . .       Of the numbers and arrangement of feathers in the wing . . . I have seen             on the plains of Apulia how the birds in earliest spring were weak       and scarcely able to…

what it was without growing old a fever a checkup the cold front dragging a rake a plow Pain thinks of something biography a place a word clearing & threshing snow & leaves opening the hour without growing old what it was Pain thinks of something arthritis blindness colloquy of field & figure light what…

Porco cane! Another day breaks with a gunshot and a chorus of yelping bloodhounds after boar. I ache to join in, but stay quiet, loyal dog-pig that I am. Pig-dog. Purebred cur in a pen: Sono io. The hunt’s trained out of me. Bark and growl, the baser instincts, I renounced them long ago. My…