Poetry

for my wife, Katherine The film of your brain is a map drawn by conquerors flying the banner of exploration and misnaming all the islands, yet we sail through the clouds swirling in this hemisphere, navigate rivers of silver till we find the white slash circled in red that tells us stroke, hemorrhage, as if…

At last she decided to speak to the moon. Having no other choice, she begged it to set her free. Why me, she asked, when others are content to sit on their haunches all night peering at your sullen face; or feel your granite pull beneath skin and obey, opening wave upon wave. When no…

He’s on top of her, barely moving, at the swimming hole I’ve called mine for years. Here, to be anything but naked is nearly sacrilegious. In the quick red canyon water sears the dusty plain. My daughter plays, oblivious to them, delicious in her two-year skin, but I can’t not look (and must if I’m…

The day threatens its hold over me, the storm closes in on the lake though I’ve heard it before, we’ve begun with the moon. Plainly stated with my silver pen: I wait for the day to fill me, to make its choice. I spin myself smaller; listen, I will not tell everything. With eating comes…

One unexceptional bright afternoon in August, coming from the rose garden secreted behind the rue Villehardouin, I thought, fleet, furtive, If I lived alone I could stay here                            and pushed the thought away as firmly and unlikely as Might rain later because I wanted just to choose and I had chosen, more than cobblestones…

You believe, if you cast wide enough your net of want and will, something meaningful will respond. Perhaps we are the response— each a cresting echo hesitating, vibrant with the moment before rippling back. But you’re steadfast as Odysseus strapped to the mast, as you were in ’81 when Reagan ordered you back to work….

Whether in chrome surgery or gymnasium toilet— everyone is expelled bloody and bleating, tube attached from mass to mass, the slick itself turning vivid. Whether there or in this floor-through, Mother, I have missed you terribly— miss you, though I know about mothering myself. * This afternoon Madeline Carmichael, 61, was convicted of fatally beating…

There’s no bobber at the surface. Nothing between you but trust in dumb suck on rubber boots & faith’s rusted buckles sunk into mud banks. Eyes trained on the current backed up against itself like a row of empty boxcars. Nylon wound around an index finger, stand ready for a tug come alive. When a…

The whites and the blacks are still newcomers. You can tell: the way we claim flags, that we fight. The other nomads were moved on, learning that land does not love humans and is not at home with us, even when it lets us grow ourselves food, even when it lets us house our dead….