Poetry

The last spike hammered into the last day meant not one more Chinese laborer would be lowered in a basket down the side of a mountain to separate the mountain from itself with a brand of dynamite that knew its own mind, never hesitating to render asunder whatever the Whiteman’s God had assembled on that…

for Flavio The plucked strings tremble & traverse the heart, back through that other strong muscle singing blood & guilt. Press a finger down & the message changes into blame & beauty, into the scent of a garden rising from peat moss & brimstone… the frets & shaped neck worked & caressed into a phantom…

1. Over and over, I think we have come to a place like this, dead sound stopping the soul in its eager conversations Or, a classical theme repeated over and over interrupted by a voice disguised as human: Please stay on the line Your call is very important to us 2. Don’t know if I…

Two weeks after her husband’s death, just before I left for the airport, my mother said, But how will I get to the lawyer’s on time tomorrow? I said Well you’ll leave the house in plenty of time, she said No no, how will I wake up in time? You’ll set the alarm, Mom, and…

This morning, I turned down Mozart to listen                         to a mockingbird perched on a wire outside my window. Poor Mozart. Dead,              he was much the worse for comparison. But as soon as I lowered the music,                                      the mockingbird flew.              He had been listening to Mozart.

When my mother turned sixty, she kissed the invisible stars on the foreheads of her two grown men and deemed them     worthy stars The sky, a vaulted blue dome, empties itself and fills Pyongyang with quick, fluid stars Tonight, longing fans out like a silk curtain over an empty room; a girl’s eyes burn…

When I am the lone listener to the antiphony of crickets and the two wild tribes of cicadas and let my mind wander to its bogs, its sloughs where no endorphins fire, I will think on occasion how all memory is longing for the lost energies of innocence, and then one night— whiskey and the…

The boy could sometimes see, could sense his father’s fondness for a thing. One Christmas he spurned comic books, penciled “shotgun” on his list to prove he’d moved beyond the tin cans and the .22. En route to the rite of deer, perhaps hunt birds…like tiny planes; safe in a blind, he’d take his time…

Bored, I open the back of an ancient clock And the minutes pile out, Exhausted from spinning Out the same hammered seconds. The minutes stagger on the table And collapse, for they are dizzy, For they have realized they have no legs, For the surface of the table is flat And what have they known…