Poetry

Six days a week at 4:40 a.m. sharp, the town crew, two men named Harold in a green town truck, rumbled down the old sewer plant road as if there was a national emergency, crying out, “Code Big Blue, Code Big Blue,” trying to reach the sewer plant before the giant blue prophylactic surfaced and…

Is everything a field of energy caused by human projection? From the crib bars hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts surrounds the soccer field of what if. Sometimes it seems like a world where no one knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes…

Humans are flown, or fall; humans can’t fly. We’re down with the gravity-stemmers, rare, thick-boned, often basso. Most animals above the tides are airborne. Typically tuned keen, they throw the ground away with wire feet and swoop rings round it. Magpies, listening askance for their food in and under lawn, strut so hair-trigger they almost…

We were looking forward to being alive. Now you new place! Me not too! Strange taste afternoon lonely for hummingbird mouthful. You somewhere else make everywhere else elser. I know almost nothing about this flower growing from my chest. Does it need dead-heading? Only you not answer. This complete the test of the emergency broadcast…

Who’ll pardon need? I was the baby & grasped things babywise: queer smells, voices, carpet nap all wrong. I crept backwards, nudged rear, rolled, sucked a red fist, knocked into & fingered at somebody’s new toy telephone, dialed up myself the house of murder: over there maybe fifteen tinny rings spooked the liver-&-white spaniel. Yelped…

Now they’re singing inside in monks’ perfect time, a God-world-world waltz every three hours. Why harmonize with the damned chimes? Match what’s built, and nothing towers. Misfits, looking out (the mistakes of twos) from a roof, for a blind date, aim their gaze— the empty frozen whites of it—and hold fire. Eyes, go ahead, past…

Bully for you, you made Glee Club. A trumpet voluntary for you!— but the Safety Patrol monitor lizard ruffles around to me when I call. You made high C, the suicide note. Attention-getter!—a smattering stirs the bleachers & I too murmur up a platitude as it ruffles around to me. Glee Club folds away scales…

She’d grown tired, she admitted, of the picturesque— pretty pipers piped against a backdrape of pineapple yellow. She closed her eyes to it and it went away. In this sight heaven she trilled her right hand in the water-lilied water and wondered at the weather. Twenty starlings twittered. The day had been dieted down to…

We are not surprised, those of us who are made, we’ve been told, in God’s image, that our God, who has not tissue nor tail, is a jealous God. What makes us snappish, after all, about God is impeccability but if jealousy makes us also Godlike—and if that’s where our love turned wrong— then there…