Poetry

As they loaded the dead onto the gurneys to wheel them from the university halls, who could have predicted the startled chirping in those pockets, the invisible bells and tiny metal music of the phones, in each the cheer of a voiceless song. Pop mostly, Timberlake, Shakira, tunes never more various now, more young, shibboleths…

He lies as still as possible and waits, then opens up his eyes. They’re everywhere. Millions, billions of motes, dead as the fates, hovering in the shafts of the morning air. Detritus of the universe, debris, the cosmic dust, polluted, dying, and dead, an endless sinking suffocating sea of sunlit dust that pins him to…

We have smoked all the cigarettes and sold the last pack years ago but I think you’ll thank us once you read the research—that much we took upon ourselves. So, remember: smoking kills. Beware of radiation, mercury and ground-level ozone, and for God’s sakes, wear your seatbelts in whatever kind of wacky cars you make….

Here, on the boulevard of run- amuck dreams, each stamped with a doll-like face you half- recognize as yours, the neon displays its chilly, self- possessed light. But the lips on the billboards are raspberry cream. They say Buy me or Be me, you can’t tell. You’re confused like mad again, in this night of…

They said that’s where Lulu went, that was the smell. Not rats. Fifty years go by. They say Yes. They don’t change their story, it’s true. A low cement block fence around the house, a collie dog bark, four kids. Not collie, but collie dog, Howdy as in Doody, The Stooges on someone else’s TV….

I’ve come home, to sit inside this house among the locusts and the crickets, their goodbye duet, their chitter and squeak of So long. Packing his things to make room for my own: his pale blue Easter suit, his Bowie knife, its leather sheath branded with Nashville. Catholic medals, a finger’s length statue of Christ…

The meadow hears everything—or does it? Perhaps the short-haired girl up to her knees in grass is the one who takes it all in. She’s skin and wide eyes, alertness and hurt, as if she can remember the fireflies sparking on some future night, the voices saying I want to be like this forever. As…

Like a voice drifting across low damp ground     it is always there. I have whole files on the subject. There is nothing more to know.     My name hangs like a sign outside an old inn, a painted figure for illiterates, blown to and fro.     Last night I had a dream of finally…

Sing for us whose troubles are troubles we’re lucky to have: cold orange juice, and cold coffee, corridor after corridor, as our circadian rhythms fall into place: work is a refuge from home, and home from work. We have task force reports, but no tasks, and no force, so far removed from concrete and crisp…