Poetry

Paint is what it is and what it ain’t. A shape or a shell, when dry, that can make what it was painted on seem extraneous. Like a house— who can imagine the canary-yellow smooth or rough integument slough off? And yet, if it did: if you were to take the supports out (the house…

Simple isn’t it? The way a fugue begins— a voice alone, another, then another— a mass of math and tangle, tumble, flash! stretto . . . Finally solo even dotted God with stars moves out. Nothing moves in.

There was a stare (yes, was) right here (hope it finds me). Right where the moon blared down its tinny gap. Prevalent predator. Originating—where? Smoke and opal, compressed to a null. Hey orb, what lives in that shell heath, shriek shack? Hey bleach-blink, sheen-gaze, pearl-pith—root of worlds. Splinter in the void’s eye, orphan. Got a…

           And the sky! Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm Of an empty nursery. Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade. The grass was lizarding, Green and on a rampage. Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem. Noon. This noon— Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom. The grass was lizarding.

The beds are long the brine is deep in which I press my thoughts to sleep of all that I should not have said or done or learned I mourn the head that held the hymn if shy if dim if unobtrusive Then salt then chest Then palm then less The lies that made me…

O small sunlight on the bark which faded before I could finish     my sentence and so changed my sentence in its course, so change me. My course is rotten, I channel Monsieur Berry—who am not     such a man. Then let my form of address or my address withal place me zip code not…

Sandspit: Decomposed body found by a moose hunter; stone-frozen corpse surfaced in a thaw; worm found in an imported apple that still cultivates silk for all underwear. Gambell: That’s all statues by the bridge. Try deering on the south shore of Sound or the outermost escarpments of the Outer Range. Angoon: Game Brain. Maim Brain….

There are two pleasures left, something and nothing and though, like money, death gets in the way of having things, there’s an extreme white arbor overhead having nothing to do with mothers and fathers or from how far away their letters pursue a reallocating child more intently than the stem of that flower ending in…

never quite buried altogether you and I in summer’s newer-than-new same light groom the dumb breathtaking throng of sprints resigned again to put everything we have on the animal that never comes in