Poetry

—for Bei Dao Lost, but for the flames we drag through dark streets; smoke and dust Aho je la, aho je la, aho jengeje, aho jengeje This chant is sky orotund with sun and the mirage: a pot smoldering against night’s face, startling last year’s spirits gathering in corners, holding on. And this—The crackle of…

When the hook-and-ladder truck took the corner far too fast, on two wheels, say witnesses, for 70 feet, and then went over, screaming on its side for 90 more, my friend, the reference librarian, was in the back of the truck, knocking around like an overripe peach in a coffee can thrown down thirteen stairs;…

For what it’s worth, once I left the convent, but I never left the Church. It’s true, I left Ireland in a hurry, too. You could say I broke the habit, or to quote my da’ “I pulled a rabbit out o’ my arse” and realized I put the cart before the horse and wasn’t…

These cyan-colored snails emerge from the white Umbrian mist with murder on their minds—memories of slow rainy Saturdays—how the city of Firenze looked to Perugino on the day his second son was born—Lord Byron’s lost reflection buried under the pebbles in the springs of Fonti del Clitunno. I feel that snail itching its way across…

I was reading the Hindu epic The Ramayana. It was spring in North Carolina: the birds fabricating their nests while I was dipping myself like a tea bag over and over in my own despair. What I like about The Ramayana is how each character suspects there is more than they know to the story….

Transparent as a think-tank fantasia, my dream of April expands its empire without resentment, dissolving all estrangements into an intimacy that makes a god out of difference, equating Madonna Ciccone’s torment on Biography with Blake’s engravings of the Inferno— an amalgam of awe and abhorrence at times beatifying the damned. Next week the secret life…

A pot found while digging, slipped out of the soil as a fish is deboned. God is said to have formed man as easily, molding him from dirt as on a potter’s wheel, but what men could you find crossing the borax flats that shine whitely, the air thick with salt and residue of rare…

One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi, another a tail of color-coded wires. One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings, another a flicker with a wounded head. All flew like leaves fluttering to escape, bright, circulating in burning air, and all returned when the air cleared. One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower, deep…

I don’t think the Mayflower’s passengers boarded with any inkling they would be revered. We imagine their journey with clean sails and blue sky, and the galley was probably filthy. Meriwether Lewis finally reached the Pacific after writing those dutiful descriptions of routes and rivers and new species, and just carved his name in a…