Poetry

If I was a real guy, said my friend Jason, and I got an e-mail like that, what would you do? Someone had told him he was a big sexy dreamboat and he was trying to figure out if he should buy a sports car and a condom or take an Alka-Seltzer and go to…

“This Book of Poems Has Been Printed on Recycled Paper” Isn’t it a form of reincarnation— the sports page or an ad for vitamins becoming, miraculously, the space where a love poem finds itself? a discarded shopping list (cereal, oranges, soap) returning to life as the backdrop for a sonnet or villanelle? I stare at…

High noon in autumn And another ovulation Of sun on its way Down the blue tube of the sky, Then out the west through red leaves. Newly awakened, With first hairs turning silver, She never conceived Any leaves could look so red Or heat her with their color. One has to wonder What she feels…

The windows will reflect harder, blacker, than before, and fresh cracks will appear in the yellow brick. There is no milkman or paperboy, but presumably the lurid pizza fliers and brassy offers of loans will continue to drop through the letterbox. The utilities will be turned off one by one, as the standing orders keel…

Count on the storm to steel the waves, tin their shimmer and heave. The electric cracks sheen the air, particle its vapors, and the wind that’s coming has already moved the sea, miles off. Shoreside, we sense the sea has breathed in and readies. Now, oiled by the hovering cobalt, it simply rolls within itself…

Rain spills leaf to leaf, rips some down the chilly greenblack air, falls and falls until it tamps October’s ripened ground that sponges up big plans. Sheet lightning popped across the water and rubbed things raw. The rain’s tinny cymbal-brushing rushes our nerves—we’ll live how long to hear it? Eighty today, Gracey on the back…

We all had to wear hats against the unvarying sun,       Of course; but what was more significant, We’d had to bring with us—along with our freshly prepared       Thoughts, wrapped up in the old way—bottled light To quench any thirst for knowledge that walking through the dry       Valley of grayish terebinths and still Lizards on chunks…

tell me baby, what’s the matter now aw, you trying to quit me baby, but you don’t know how —Billie Holiday you can’t keep track of what’s what calling it what it’s not but stir shade & heavy cream into coffee & there’s breath-flash clean as knife-wind in the brain blown down the full length…

I wander down rows of plastic magic—glowing       The boy comes home to a house too full of skulls and x-ray specs squeezed in next to sneeze dust       decoupage and dead dreams, his mother nearly adrift in genie bottles, fake ice where flies swim frozen,       on the dhurrie beige couch, worn down with being arrested, ruled…