Poetry

Shucking corn on the veranda, my sister said she didn’t care that her father had dropped by, or that I’d finally met him. Later, after the dark started to rake in, I found her outside again, staring at the sweep of fallow fields and shadows around our mother’s rented house, the curious row of weathered…

Placed on the earth for this little moment I wake today to entertain the world. But, Lord, before first light only the clouds my answerer, even to no question, I stare outside, at the black broken universe I cannot see: trees, clouds, birds, stones, fence, grass— all the accouterments of worship on my eyes and…

“Like one man milking a billy goat another holding a sieve beneath it,” Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient. It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter. In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk. One morning finding pudding and a washed pot, another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser. After…

In college I loved Browning’s phrase— was it in “Two in the Campagna”?— “tangled ropes of lasagna” and even today I think it may have been pasta which civilized the Italians so much they refused to fight for Mussolini—remember how Marshall Badoglio’s armies surrendered in Africa tutti and rapidamente?—and even the names make you smile:…

A solitary clock behind bars, floors forbidden to street shoes, exit signs— one, two, three, four: fine—& waxy cries of boys, one mine, practicing their dribbling & bank shots. My eyes closed, the volley of Spaldings pounds like opening night of Operation Desert Storm, or Shield, or whatever war our Sonys dust up next ….

If I was a real guy, said my friend Jason, and I got an e-mail like that, what would you do? Someone had told him he was a big sexy dreamboat and he was trying to figure out if he should buy a sports car and a condom or take an Alka-Seltzer and go to…

“This Book of Poems Has Been Printed on Recycled Paper” Isn’t it a form of reincarnation— the sports page or an ad for vitamins becoming, miraculously, the space where a love poem finds itself? a discarded shopping list (cereal, oranges, soap) returning to life as the backdrop for a sonnet or villanelle? I stare at…

From here it looks like forgiveness, the possibility of a man: himself a meadow I traverse by sight, by feel, hand over hand across the green of him, eyelight by eyelight until I take him all in. Or is it just the front yard again, azaleas, hot pepper plants, and a stand of pampas grass…

Replace “snow” with “sparks” and see if the moral survives. Lie down and make a spark angel. Then replace “angel” with “angle” and see if morality survives. Our liberal society depends upon the difference of each flake and the capacity of the different flakes to form a drift. I looked down into my bowl of…