Poetry

He speaks a farewell kiss to me. —Bob Dylan Pagan psalmody singing his checkered face into my sleep, tomahawk at our side, head in the bag. Ready                                  to venture out against the colorless light, slandering a white gaze. That’s all it takes to find the world on                                  its bow, turn a wheel against…

What happened of course was nothing extraordinary except for the bracelet she found in her mailbox—a breakfast of flat red stones, the painted smash of a river bottom. The river, she liked to imagine, in Africa, in Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam. The Rufiji, perhaps, for she is touching a map now and dreaming of…

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops…

Swallows, phoebes, flycatchers, chickadees, warblers, and some terns and sparrows are less than an ounce, and are so little of water, more hollow than bone, though of substance in boughs and leaves, where they perch and fly, for how little they want of what matters, bright and unmistakable—aspiring, disappearing—not of who they are but of…

Stoned in the canned jangle of steel drum tunes in the faux Tiki bar, I sit below dusty plastic fronds and nurse my drink. A few stools down, too precious for words, a tongue-studded, nose-ringed, lesbian couple, heads bowed close, whisper secrets and softly laugh. I want their love to last. I order a plate…

I’d read the book before but when the building blew up I found myself drawn in again. I knew the wife would yell, “Oh,” as her husband fell. There would be the blackness of the night and the way the world becomes a gray swirl before our eyes. I picked up a section of orange…

She is unnaturally educated. Can take a word, crosshair it into place and begin its trajectory toward l’ancien. Greek, Latin, hieroglyphics. Whatness is concerned with content. So many private horrors stink of kerosene, bloodsport. Whereness is concerned with linkages. We begin almost demented by the Big Bang accuracy of metaphor. And the Word was ….

    She tells me, “It smells like your mother” as we enter room 53 (twin beds, bath, 95 euros)         of the Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc in Paris, and it’s true,     there’s a heavy though not displeasing scent of lilac face powder of the kind used         by old Southern ladies of a certain generation….

If description could outpace effusions of feeling, serif or sans serif, punctuated with dashes and in Amherst, could one say it was a peculiar summer. I tried to like what I’d always liked and tried to get there sooner rather than later. I’d forgotten I liked orange until on a scale of one to ten…