Poetry

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:…

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…