The yellow eye and needle beak of that black bird, because the tree is swaying—look, it’s saying I, I’m staying. Reports from the south and west come far worse, where of course they understand the danger, who chose danger in that form and not another, though it must seem unfair, disproportionate, how that balance of…
Stabbed by the heron’s shadow as the bird planed above me on these flats, I am back in Taylorville, 1958, scratching the low-tide mud with Linc and his father, the Kaiser. “No future in oysters, boy.” The old man’s advising one or both of us to stay in school or else enlist in the Navy:…
With my jade and pebbled hide, my fleas and magnificent talons, Why have I long cooped under this iron bridge in Kittanning on the Allegheny? See the green-bottle flies over the giant catfish rotting on a rock, General Armstrong’s hoofed men swarming down a hillside with smoke. I want you to notice how thin my…
Color of a two-day new bruise, pored and faintly fuzzed like the pad of a dog’s paw. Skin so thin faucet water risks rubbing through to moony fruit, the shape and pitless-centered weight of testes. No stone, too malleable so, not a drupe. Dropped, it wobbles to find plumb center, comes to rest on star-shaped…
“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.” —Edward Abbey The horizon gutted, skinned, unfurled and dried like a diamondback, no secrets, no secret sea cave stash, so evident it all seems invisible: fissures in the orange San Andreas, smoking asphalt on a runaway go-cart, 100% clear…
The stick the dog drags writes a poem in the snow along the railroad tracks. Is it my life she’s writing in a long, slow cursive already half-buried by fresh snow? There, written in a winter forest, lies my story, for anyone to read.
De Español y de India Produce Mestizo —after a series of Casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, ca. 1715 The canvas is a leaden sky behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing an equation of blood— this plus this equals this—as if a contract with nature, or a museum label, …
Or a gauze that only measures a wound. Or a path of frozen ruts, mocking escape. What remains is a distraction, the ratio of exhibitionism to buoyancy. Which loses its shape first? Lung smoke? Stocking?
I was hoping for some contact with the natives, the ones who built these sepulchral impediments, an iron pianist whose music issues from a hole in the head, a broken column, a big marble ball. This is how they honor their dead even when the ground’s too frozen to make a dent, the fauna dependent…
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