Poetry

I can"t say: sweat, and then skin, and then mom, and then speak. No such thing as a sentence, it seems. No such thing as what’s    happening. Moth under the covers, get out. Brown wings, hung on the lamp    stand. If the soul lives in memories then the soul is no matter to reckon   …

The street went up a slight rise and then angled up toward the left, like a raised arm. There were four utility poles on one side: each pole was a T with two crosses, with the wires coming from each pole and extending out in a messy radiance of black lines to the houses and…

Perhaps someone was watching a mud turtle or an armadillo skulk along an old interminable footpath, armored against sworn enemies, & then that someone shaped a model, nothing but the mock-up of a hunch into a halved, rounded, carved-out globe of wood covered with animal skin. How many battles were fought before bronze meant shield…

The embarrassment of wanting to pray to God, the demand that God give a good Goddamn had made him pretty nutty by the end; a lifelong Marxist, he took up with Ouspensky, then spent all his money (and he had tons, all those years in the bank when Das Kapital and the Wall Street Journal…

Federal holding cell, Hughes County jail Fights. Never quiet—like years back with the folks, but ratcheted-up, bloodied, multiplied, till the badge writes the last two shovers up, says he’ll do the same for all of us if we can’t keep the crybabies smothered I WANT SOME PEACE, SLEEP, NO MORE GETTING OUT OF THE CHAIR,…

after Rilke It’s time, Lord. The summer was so immense. Now on the sundials your shadows stretch their lengths And across the meadows you release the winds. Command the last fruits to swell with life, Grant them still a few days of florid sun, Press them to completion, and like a hunter Chase the fleeting…

There’s mercy in the decades as they pass, reducing years of ache to a single afternoon beneath a cherry tree in a terraced garden: the cherries seem to ripen while we gaze, darkening as sunlight starts to fade. You’re talking; I’m waiting for you to realize what you won’t admit for another decade: love is…

The argument begins. One voice is overcoming another because it’s had it, it’s had enough of all this shit and, unaccompanied, rises to the edge of screaming and past it till the column of air in that throat has nearly abandoned everything under it. Only the vault of the forehead and the bridge of the…

This is my father bent like a Michelangelo prophet over a tray of spore, showing me how to pour boiling water over the soil to eradicate fungi, etc. I stand beside him ignoring his lecture. Instead watch steam from his coffee cup curl into the blue of the tubular daylight bulbs. This is my brother…