Poetry

  • Winter

    Furious snow cardinals & diode array. Methuselah walks by me in coats. Vast brackets of light. Those sugar packets on the road:                                               a branch encased in ice would almost seem to indicate them. The first bomb opens itself in space. By red by half-silvered light—“to home.” How that a life were but a place?…

  • Childless

    Bones like a bird’s you quicken your hands, flit and mock,   take stock of who’s watching— every move a melodrama, a poised   snap, a shot that shapes you as the lead of a film no one   can stop. Your fingers play invisible keyboards,   your toes point, turn out in stance, your…

  • We Want A Farm

    We would like to grow herbs, cooking herbs and chamomile and lavender, and keep birds, farm fish, collect dogs and cats and horses. There isn’t enough room in the apartment. We need a plant to cover the litter boxes in the bathroom. There’s an unfinished birdcage you’ve built in the bedroom and now you’ve started…

  • Oak, November

    for Grace There’s an oak leaf, one     caught in the latch on the door lodged like a letter in a letter box. It knocks slowly, eight-prongs     the wind tips it back, head leaning away     stem like a tail, wind knocking softly      turning over the life of a tough brown leaf. Stronger than a grasping hand,…

  • Psalm: Made by What

    Made by what I read    Slippage           To think             a fall broken                 as not a         stumble                         but a certain voice                     among the trees Listen              Listen            I am the ghost of undivided attention             I am     what Saul saw on the road near Damascus I am the ancient sigh pushed             out on the…

  • The Lion and The Gazelle

    Because the bullet was a dream before it was a bird. Because the bullet was a dream before it alighted in the child’s body while he looked at a pigeon wobbling through the air. Because the child has moved into photographs on mantels and the dreamer’s hands are folded in his lap and have not…

  • Eighteenth-Century Boisseau House

    Virginia, after a WPA photo Leafless tree shadow scribbles its face and shadows of deflated bushes flood the yard, an arrogant silver squalor so riddled and clumped it seems a crowd had barged about, then despaired of raising a response from such a blank and pointless house. Bare weatherboard of equivocal color, snaggle-toothed shutters. The…

  • Drunk

    When William Blake came fashionably late to parties he’d blame it on archangels, prophecies broadcast between the leaves of ordinary trees in the orchard: those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained… As in Martinsville, Wisconsin, when we allowed Mike Meinholz to get in the car, surely a mistake,…