Poetry

He lunged for the shut-off switch when he heard the scream. But the brutal five-inch teeth on the rotating drum, designed to excavate the coal face, had already destroyed helmet and hair, scalp and brain. Its rotation diminishing now, the carbide-tipped cutter bits dripping with the miner’s mistake. The noise declining as the massive drum,…

At the stained window, a morning jay. I stop my scissoring, as if I could reclaim a Santiago of bird-call and sudden ease, as if I could annul the battle-gray maze of gutting jails, courthouses, morgues— purgatory where I bend over the burlap, again and again, to show the world the smashed black bell of…

They’re going to Glasgow, they’re going to Inverness     and to Skye. They’ll ride over bogs of musk ox and arctic foxes, tracing the scat of polar bears,     open-mouthed masses swallowing snatches of blue vacancies, ragged absences filling the empty air,     sea birds climbing, vanishing only to emerge in Reykjavík and west, soaring…

for Jeff Male (1946–2003)   When I cough, people duck away, afraid of the coal miner’s disease, the imagined eruption of blood down the chin. In the emergency room the doctor gestures at the X-ray where the lung crumples like a tossed poem. You heard me cough, slipped off your coat and draped it with…

Don’t look up, because the ceiling is suffering some serious violations of the electrical code, the whole chaotic kelplike mess about to shower us with flames. I think I can render this clearly enough— Bert’s saxophone resting between his knees and propped against the wheelchair’s seat where his body keeps shape-shifting— he’s Buddha then Shop-Vac…

for Roger C. Frank A fighter jet etches ink white as sperm on the stark sky while January troops deploy from Camp LeJeune, just like my first husband did in 1968 on his way to Viet Nam to wipe the Commie Gooks off the map. Before he could spell Khe Sahn, think massacre, he was…

I.   The garden of Eden. Also called earthly p., to distinguish it from the heavenly p.                                                      First She is seventeen, he twenty-one. She is a green girl, Ophelic but believing Herself a witch-queen, while he plays Edmund, Bastard and natural. Sitting on the cliff’s edge, her Back to the village where floats down…

When the poles clatter past, the years fall away, a spider drops from the petals of a flower, space is ever more empty the larger it grows, the steel wheels chunk-chunk-chunk on the joints of the rails, the friction making sparks, stars crushed and invisible to us inside. There is a distance that diminishes as…

In line with many strangers, we were roughed-up bodies ready for more. We clasped hands. A song made us iron. The line of us could walk and sing. The line of us went on and on—up the steps of the capitol and out into towns with quarter-inch phone books. Some in line knew the gods…