Poetry

By perspective, I meant how                                                      eventually every landscape wouldn’t have to include defilement, or any other outrage, getting smaller each time we looked back on it,                                                            or forgot not to. An armload of millet and sunflowers could, despite the fact of July, just like that, turn the room October. I believed suffering happened…

All Winter I’ve Waiteds. The Then You Came Backs. Wands. Wounds. Tarot Cups. Lisps. Strapless Dresses. Sylvia Tears. Conjugations. Anne Frank’s Looms. Another Man Done Gone. Kleenex After Sex. Mrs. Manner’s Accidents. The How Funerals. The Greedy Toos. Freaks. The What Happens Every Afternoon. The Purple Spot on My Neck. The Eye Tricks. Children’s Bibles….

sweet, waxy smell, and opaque film it dries to a kleenex on the thumb, a coal-black residue it lifts, the watery depth of tarns, corroding vapors, killer oxygen, pure proficiency, what it should be, neutral as a crease, or a smart salute, or alignment, the meditational boots under the slow, circular spit, the mindless attention,…

Snow like the cold lard of falling stars strikes the windshield. A small thermos of tea rolls around in the glove compartment. I sneeze. Up in the black trees, the moon and the snow are repeatable in the long spine of a woman who has opened her high window. It is her signal to the…

They say my great-uncle read foreign books in a mud house in Nanking, plowed his twenty acres, listened to rare birds, disobeyed the tides’ yes and no. One day he knelt in the street, sign around his neck that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax over him, even beech trees turned. He labored…

My father bars the door, bars harm From this house, and it is years. —Louise Glück, “Gretel in Darkness” I was fearless under the firmament, the starry dark my first education in freedom. It was my last. On the second night— when there were no guiding stones— it was clear: the expanse was a cold…

It started with herrings, which he ate with warm black bread as a child, and ended with two pigs, the forbidden. It started with the strict dietary laws of his father, a pious Jew, a mender, and ended with ulcers, which he disobeyed. He was snubbed by a bouquet of colorful flowers on a balcony…

Now I see it: a few years To play around while being Bossed around By the taller ones, the ones With the money And more muscle, however Tender or indifferent They might be at being Parents; then off to school And the years of struggle With authority while learning Violent gobs of things one didn’t…

So far the house still is standing. So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life. An almost readable language. Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country— you know that something important has happened, but not what.