Poetry

Don’t let me end up a mural on Bryant St.Sound of a cheap lighter heating a joint. Hiss like deep inhale from a fresh joint,large worries can be made small with a mouth. Large worries made small in Sunday’s mouth:aunties’ lips while they sing, victory is mine I dream and sing, victory, today, is mine,eye…

The Germans have a word for you—schnappsidee—an idea                    fueled by margaritas or shots of tequila or bottles of vinobianco or rosso, you know the ideas that maybe involve a road trip                    to Miami or California and you wake up in a parking lotin Mississippi or Delray Beach with a dead french fry stuck                    to the side of your…

As a child, I hid to read your waves,nothing can lie in water.I wanted to peek throughyour wreckages, wrap your windaround my breath,I wanted to keep your sand,shells, and all your shores.The water’s reflection slowlypeeled fear from my skin,women sang to the shipsas if the world was breaking outto carry the cloudsto the other side…

We think we canfind the beginning,the origin, the genesis. We look everywhere,the nativity is nowhere,Jesus is absent. The land is lost,it doesn’t speak these languages.The sea keeps its own history. We keep our own imagesof our bible,our Terra Santa. When you cameyou found what’s modern,what’s wretched, not your holy, and back thenthe olive trees weren’treplaced…

The oracles say the quiet part out loud.A wife is a machine of someone else’sdreams. To survive, you must drown a heartthat wants to float, muscle atrophying in salt.Make an artifact out of your pain, a tributeto the girl you used to be. Ignore the hot pinchin your chest from holding your breathfor a decade….

1. They sleep on their shadows,long for no one,their speech drifts weightlessthrough their lanes. Gold thread, fistfuls of barley,a jar of Aristaeus’s gold,an old woman’s needle,her pearly lace lining the harbor road. Taxis for Darnis awaiting passengers,Sudanese farmhands milling about,and into the bay, the sponge pickers go onflirting with death. You and I are two,I…

I figured if I studied enough, life would make senseso I skipped the games and the girls, ate lunchin a hurry and spent the afternoons in the library. On Saturday nights when everyone was outgunning their engines, I camped alone at the beachlistening to the lap of waves and the chittering of birds. Flashlight in…

Just there, deep in shadow, the peeling paint of an old door to a carriage                    house behind untrimmed cypress branches,a shade somewhere between turquoise and navy wrung by rain to                    namelessness,a color we can no longer locate on the spectrum, the lost blue of tenderness                    and sorrow overlain with exaltation,a door we walk past once in the gathering…

Was it madness that enabled you to fall into the ocean—if you were “dancing” on the rocks as I’ve been told, it couldhave been loss of balance—we say that of the mad don’t we,I can see each taunting lift of foot, the bitten hands flailing,I can, off East Haven more than forty years passing each…