Poetry

Hammer out of the cage the movie insists: banged blonde, blocked highway the gorilla helps wreck—look, Ma, no cloverleaf. The chaste scene. The woman born from the thigh she is holding, the one eye of the truck that becomes worry. I’m not the Lithuanian accenting Every threat, I’m not even the foliage that spends itself…

Students all too commonly misconstrue the poem in which Sappho calls that man equal to a god, who, opposite you, leans in and        whispers, etcetera, tending to assume it’s about two people: speaker/loved one? Beloved and man near her, bending close to her, whom the poet hears as,        heads close together, they laugh softly? Wait:…

Such shrieking from the scrub jays, And then I see what’s up: A crow has a half-grown jay pinned on its back And is hammering like a cartoon Woodpecker at its breast. The adult jays force the crow a few feet away, But the terrified groundling can only manage A feeble waggle of its feet…

The gray building of a pig farm, inside Grunting and growling, almost black doughy mud Through which they slogged, in squelching rubber boots, That wet summer abounding in frogs, they worked By accident on this farm, not quite a farm, in a poor Region of dwarf pines and junipers, Partly withered, at the edge of…

To live without memory is to have each hour as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window to paint: amber-honey cold mornings: humbled by evening:: variation and variation of ambiguous figments—ziggurat beehive auroras—flicker and go out. All history may as well be in these brushstrokes: the hand has not rested…

For five years my father’s body lay abandoned at the Tri-State Crematory in North Georgia. Along with 333 other bodies, his remains were recovered in 2002. He says he’s been pretty disappointed with the whole thing. Like all of us he had heard of so many possibilities. Like the white light churning at the tunnel’s…

Beginning in the midst of things that split or burn or tear the skin with happenstance, this elegant, unkempt earth of rust and dust, smashed cat and armadillo roadkill, abandoned pickup trucks blocking the berm. A fine scum of rumor and pine pollen coats cars and sidewalks, spring’s clumsy fingers smear the seen with allergens:…

In the hundred days I lived in a trailer in Ithaca, New York, I thought unceasingly of that other Ithaca, wine-dark, beset, a place from which to start from, maybe to come home to in some eventuality undreamed of. I cleaned factories for a guy named Ben who wanted to make movies and whom I…

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin. With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap, I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet of moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts. With the new…