Poetry

The song of someone like me begins on the penny whistle. A few notes, just a few, up and down. The bass line comes in, then the lead and second guitar. Brushstrokes on the snares. And then the singer, Lord, then the singer steps up. What voice could slip this backdrop? Only the rise and…

If memory were easy, I wouldn’t care for it: Not the poorest truth, the hard-won winter Darling, without a single trick of light or Cloud light-burred and blurred for light green Air to play on. Worse the flirty silliness: The soft, lost summer lies. The hedonist Inheritance: Pressed like a nymph to faun On flesh…

What matters is how you disagree with me, not the smooth surfaces of your appeasements. Let snow melt off the statues, parks come and go like seasons. See the park in snow see my hands rough from snow fingers red and stiff and remember the past when they begin to thaw filling with pain they…

Dispatched with a worn brush, the cursive writing of poet Xaian Shu possessed heroic spirit. His calligraphy’s balanced characters pointed to diligent study. Scholar, poet, Mi Fu’s idiosyncratic running characters wrote of living in peaceful times before the Mongols roared down from the north. His writing was described as a “sailboat in a gust of…

Kids in the Dumb Class weren’t allowed to enroll for French So instead we learned the difference between ser and estar. A yellow-haired midget father in a white suit cursed me for being In his family tent-yard, where I had wandered. He was my size. All a misunderstanding, we weren’t that stupid. I was earning…

Flying over many states, driving through many streets, I come to The Chapel in the Pines, where a film of your life shows our trunks bunched in at the crotch as we take turns burying each other in the sands of Far Rockaway, each standing by a mound, like archeologists discovering tombs, tombs of their…

How naughty to run the car with a hose             Returning the fumes             To the man in the car How lonely to sit in the fume-ridden car       Alone on a Wednesday morning How silly to end with your head in a bag             A white plastic bag             The end of your life How awful to get the…

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:…