Poetry

  • The Invention of Mirror

    “And therein found this face” there at the bottom          something moved behind the panel sliding, the habit of inhabiting. We were hungry. We turned into hands and then into shadows of hands moving at the back of the mirror. They poured liquid metal across flattened panes. Ice upon ice: antimony, lead, colophonium                   (once…

  • Crushed Cargo

    (Study #1) The wind! Forest of frightened women. Flap of ears sound of wooden castanets panting dry tongues. (Study #2) Moleculations. The Little Toe of Their Bacchanal still unbroken against your housedress way of feeling alive. The Fruits & Nuts pattern. Yet you rarely eat among people since in heavenly harmony fully dethinged they came,…

  • Side Effects

    Your papillae momentus is shot, these pills may help but you’ll probably lose your right arm. My right arm! How will I live? So the client thrashes out of the office like a man learning to swim by drowning but after a couple weeks, he can almost float, button his own coat. So he goes…

  • Alphabet City, 1994

            To the loft and to them I came to be the opiate, not the administered,         fiending to become the body without self, reversible as a jacket, Able Was         I Ere I Saw Elba, as the trompe l’oeil in Psych remaining two faces         human, the Queen and her Consort, seen from another…

  • The Horse, Susan Said

    The horse, Susan said, because it is the blankest of slates, or because our success—our genes’ successes—are linked, has been written on extensively by our needs. Dumb giants pawing the ground, father, mother, escape, sexuality glistening and rippling, forelock and fetlock, footloose and fearless, or the pleasures of the fearful—fleeing the sudden gesture, careening through…

  • Icarus in Dedalus’s Studio

    A wing’s a bridge                        made of light and lightness. Such an unattaching, then then, such a humming garden. What is finished is brutal. Pink            swallow, brown wings and tail                                 acock on a porcelain vase, can be diving so, only if whole is the greenest color.                                 Return, world. Be a little whether….

  • Unknowing

    If you materialize this thing, which is a lamp, which is a cup,     as practice. If you light it, if you drink from it. Although the long day is still ahead, you may behave in the dark as you do in the dark. The light won’t find you out, it will make room, it…