Poetry

The stick the dog drags writes a poem in the snow along the railroad tracks. Is it my life she’s writing in a long, slow cursive already half-buried by fresh snow? There, written in a winter forest, lies my story, for anyone to read.

De Español y de India Produce Mestizo —after a series of Casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, ca. 1715 The canvas is a leaden sky     behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing     an equation of blood— this plus this equals this—as if     a contract with nature, or a museum label,    …

Or a gauze that only measures a wound. Or a path of frozen ruts, mocking escape. What remains is a distraction, the ratio of exhibitionism to buoyancy. Which loses its shape first? Lung smoke? Stocking?

I was hoping for some contact with the natives, the ones who built these sepulchral impediments, an iron pianist whose music issues from a hole in the head, a broken column, a big marble ball. This is how they honor their dead even when the ground’s too frozen to make a dent, the fauna dependent…

The teleology of what I now perceive. Contraction. Exile. The afternoon we paddled home in two canoes from the end of the lake, the sky programmatic and threatening, the seven of us eager to reenter the domestic space—the raindrops long as spoons, later the guinea pigs discovered huddled under the station wagon, the reformulation of…

They try to watch themselves, drifting in a white sigh, the boats and trees, and themselves, too, when they think of it, spun from sheets of gauzy droplets with which to tar the morning white and walk upon it. The horizon yawns. The earth is liquid. They can feel it, and not just it but…

Well, there’s the lack of vacuuming, carrot juice spills on the ivory couch, dust running along the floorboards like a pet, veiling the TV, sills, the furnishings of books, shoes without glue, the lack of comfortable seating or dining, the canopy I gave away, childhood desk sold, gold chair left in a spidery garage, rose…

A missing tooth and a fang. A bloom and a sandstorm. A love letter and a trapdoor. A can opener and a kiss. A maraca and a spear. Lowered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow job. A baroque flute flourish and an eerie silence just beyond the     cabin door. A tube top and…

In the morning my neighbor walks onto his deck and looks out, some days in a yellow jacket, some days in a raincoat, some days in a shirt. The house is far enough off I do not know his name, cannot quite see his face. I would not know him in line at the grocery….