Poetry

  • Passage from an Autobiography

    You would not have known me. I saw contradictions beneath every event. Rose garden or gas station? Swimming pool or eternity? I might look up, convinced something had ended, or something had begun. As I walked between bedrooms and pharmacies, I might come to a furious pitch. One month I thought I was marked. I…

  • 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…

  • The Country House

    Asking     Carrying a bucket full     Of a broken window or     Watching people and their mirrors on     TV; the woods tamped down     By snow and the very high iron of trees;     Air passes from purple to blue into     Black pitched lower than trees;     Glass for this     Half-week….

  • The Bat

    They kept him alive for years in warm water, The soldier who had lost his skin.                                                          At night He was visited by the wounded bat He had unfrozen after Passchendaele, Locking its heels under his forefinger And whispering into the mousy fur. Before letting the pipistrelle flicker Above his summery pool and tipple there,…