Poetry

For a while I was dropped but I’m back on the assembly line. My boss is the Muse, who cites me for laziness and other offenses. I confess I try on the words in the back room sometimes, do a jig in front of the mirror, and cringe at the difference between what I am…

1. The cherry tree bends not from its fruit but cold. Cold has more desire than tree or beholder to make a pleasing form. I have made a decision to stand under what shelter might be offered by the tree and let all tropical routine submerge under the actual sap that gilds fruit and dream…

after John Clare All dark, and my feet against          the feed-room floor                   scuff cement, find their way          to the light, the switch, which flares on          with a snap of bird-                   wings’ nimble shuffle          and flight, the rafters blowing off feathers,          then my hands against                   the grain bin’s…

Eight years later the woman is given a house for five months at the edge of town in the desert. It’s August and the desert is green. When rain falls, she drives beyond the dark clouds. Past an antelope resting, legs under it, head raised, white marks. Drives slowly around a turtle. If the man…

was next week with a garden in it, next winter with the glow of the unborn. My back up against the mountain, face to the snowy field,—glassy branches of the apple tree. If there was a mistake somewhere I didn’t know it, I only knew the deodar choked on sky,—despite the rumor of unaltered roots….

Pain thinks of the sea the blackened fields the shore without daylight Pain thinks of the hour’s fires without witness the horses breaking & the sea breaking Pain thinks of the fields the tide rising in light’s black zone without body or breath Pain thinks of the sea without witness Pain thinks of Alcibiades

1. If it’s true jazzmen hurt a load of women like gods playing double-time to a packed house then it’s true a certain kind of woman hurts for jazz because I know Rebecca Geraldine slips in says all Charlie has is a horn and a habit I come in third Doris Sydnor lipsticked a hatcheck…

Further west there was the bee-buzz of Sirens impassioned like the jobless. Already gone were the thick shoes on the shore-rock as they changed to hooves. Gone as well all souls puffing behind the ship like an ash-cloud in a slow wind. Everything had come to be nude: the voices munching in me like a…

whose strict interpretations are no help to me this morning— you can’t meet my need to go through the world unseeingly; I must attend your demonstrations. Turn the pepper-leaves to earrings, knight the sugar, turn light to salt, cups to miners’ lamps then back to whole seasons of rain in the subcontinent. I move in…