Poetry

What if we could look at language as matter [as real and outside our imagining as granite or cedar trees] and move inside words, the way particle physicists break into atoms with the force of their own energy and light? To track the intelligent chaos of language by threshing open the word,                        olive pressed…

A little morning of Scarlatti, and prudent flowers, white tulips even whiter in light from the window’s true divided panes, grass, a rufus-sided towhee and invisible fox in shadow, yes, this was witnessed while a second dream went on, a knife slitting through an abdomen and upward to a chest wall, a whole country grimacing,…

He tells the deputies he was drowned as a boy in a well of holy water, and so has returned this way: full wet, a rattle of bones beneath his clothes, and all manner of love for his fellow man coming over him each time the way a storm comes over a mountain. The long…

Days uncoiling like the hose from her fingers, days measured by the mechanical car buzzing down the driveway. Her boys wrestle for the control box, shriek, their calls tear the air, hush the birds, and send her, with hose, to transmit water against their heads just enough to shut them off. Now only the sound…

Arthur Dove, 1931 I have spent all day with the silver disc of the barn owl’s face embedded in my thoughts & my beloved under general anesthetic, his whole form etherized, calcite laddering his spine, strange thorns in the distinct cave of him. I wring my hands, silly spinsterish fret-motion, I say shoo but still…

i. I say Bora Bora. You are not to say Bora Bora. I say Bora Bora for it is one of the names of God. You are not to say one of the names of God. I— You are not able or you are not worthy. — You botch or you rot (transitive). — Botu-lizm…

There have been many— Who called in the ships— Ships in off the dark water. Instinct one minute— Satire the next—. There have been many. From one vision to the next— It is a long distance. Not just anyone can go there. You have to carry a moth through rain. You have to feign lightning….

Two bow hunters were heading out of the woods after another day without bringing back a deer, when, at a puddle in a logging road rut, tangled in some branches above it, dangling down, they spied one of those red and white fishing bobbers. “What the hell?” the first bow hunter said, but concerned that…

If this were the sea and not snow, morning- cold, Ohio, the slick, black trees standing for themselves along our ice creek, then these birds might seem ready for the flight. They’ve opened their massive wings, five, six feet across, and hold them to the cold sun as though cutting through salt winds unfettered. This…