Poetry

The owl said, My son, Oak Table, your stand is strong. I have four talons on each leg, and you four talons on each leg. Our cold heavy hold holds mostly air. We are able. The table did not speak. We both make our home in the oak. My eyes glow with the glow of…

He sailed to wherever the sirens were, surviving by lashing himself to the mast. An image of stalwart resistance, or weakness. And the singers mere angels. And heaven only desire, simply the illegal. Sailed into the not-quite world. Or returned home to slay the suitors who had been feasting there for years. What about afterwards?…

Photograph found in the road: bejeweled hand gripping a limp cock. All parties suffering from lack of ambition. The hills of Tuscany won’t dapple with sunlight, and here it is nearly noon. You didn’t much want that leather jacket, the vendor didn’t really care to sell it, you hardly tried it on, he barely praised…

The women said, “You wished the rain on us and now you are    leaving.” They kept the rain and I left. The muck of that place stayed on my shoes for a mile and then it was a new road with a sour mud and red cliffs and a wind better than a sweetheart….

after Ou-yang Hsiu In my kiosk for one, I, for one, water- colored on the grounds for concern. And everywhere I ever lived pined on a cinderblock in pencil. The rubbing may give you ideas. The princess never felt it more, the underlying in pursuit, lodged, a tiny drum in coverage and coverage of coverage….

Shame is my sister. She’ll have no niece. Agree in me a tenancy of junction and a process of elimination. One has promises and room for whom to keep herself. A pinkening vibe, as from exit light in other halls, mother-runs this cloister of disavowal, and in the sobbed-inside cells locked to mine I imagine…

after Pavese October: gravity and annulling wind pinioning the limbs of the fruit trees, the glinty olives; the cannon-gray dawn auguring a long, lax day of rain— Where once a young god breathed, whose footsteps astonished the earth, whom Viking sadness touched hardly at all, like a cloud’s frail shadow, now, at the windowsill, a…

for Gertrude Stein O gloves of Sweden, you with the suede verbs, whoever yearns for you has more than earned her heap of earth and its kern and slur of notes. How much space should we leave between words? Enough for Elijah to come in or for love to let itself out? Let it be…

Its deep green lancelets open as psalms above the knotted, black stems; a promise of bud in two years’ time frozen hard in the cells like the possibility of migraine or sickle cell in blood, the low hum of obesity turned to tuber-shaped, scaled appearances; a pink, soft frost or gilding; padmokasa bulbed out of…