Poetry

  • Some Writers in Wartime

    What is essential as breath reduced to a squabble about moral parity to hold a brief for the party that orders death. Moral parody: ours is but to cook, serve, clear, speak when spoken to. * We will not swell the glory chorus, slaughter calling to slaughter like lovers possessed. Nor will we turn away….

  • More than Peace and Cypresses

    More than peace and cypresses, emboldened hares at the field’s edge, Father, I love gallantry, tenacity, the sanguine heart before the ledge: the artist questing and failing— the feet of bested Icarus plunging into the sea’s crest— the artist triumphing: a page of fire from the book of heroes. More than light-hooved gazelles, views from…

  • A Spell to Wake My Brother

    We will weave through the labyrinth of headstones to clear the patch of soil where you rest, to plant a tall palm with leaves that know that north sea breeze, to roast a suckling pig. The blood of this pig will mingle with your bones, tickle your limbs, awake the bomba y plena pulse. We…

  • Abraham and Isaac: II

    And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son I have lived in tents and often, at midday, have I parted the tent-clothes and gone inside with the light of day so blinding my eyes that my wife spoke to me out of darkness, saying, Take this dish, and eat. I have walked among…

  • The Avalanche

    He braked the old green Chevy     on the side of a mountain         somewhere out West and bet my mother he could     start a serious avalanche         by kicking a single rock into another no she said no please don’t Dan     please don’t start an avalanche         please and in the back…

  • Fuses

    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…