Poetry

The Weather Guy

Hurricane This is scaring us, Hurricane That’s not far behind, And we’re not turning our backs one second. We look at the screen all day. We find Hurricane This still flapping away At the shirt of Tom the Weather Guy. Canada throws an arm around him. Hurricane That just bats an eye. Hurricane This is…

Maintenance

How exhausting it is to be constructed of a thousand parts—or is it several thousand? Even the potato locked in the darkest antechamber has a certain cunning, how it shoots its push to the window’s crack, how it sniffs about for whatever, dirt. You know what I’m saying— don’t make me say it. It’s too…

Lions Bible

An 1804 edition in which 1 Kings 8:19 reads ‘But thy son that shall come forth out of thy lions’ instead of ‘loins’ Empires are my premise. Archilochos my schoolchair. More was my first word and that means Rome. Denotation is detonation, be careful. As car fuel: at home in the anger, at home on…

Summer in the Country

One shows me how to lie down in a field of clover. Another how to slip my hand under her Sunday skirt. Another how to kiss with a mouth full of blackberries. Another how to catch fireflies in jar after dark. Here is a stable with a single black mare And the proof of God’s…

Sonnet

There were lies. You knew, but then forgot the child peeking around the corner, hiding from you. Wind sifts through the beechnut arbor. Peripheral, the real story goes trailing moonlike, behind the car window, just beyond view. And how bad is it to have believed the best of your story, or a lover’s; to have…

Field Character

Mothlike, he makes the swallow look slow, separating his flight-feathers as fingers, closing the trailing edge of his wings between beats, and his lyre-shaped tail, from his old, cupped nest of leaves to his later chosen, true, domed nest of reeds. Often he merges with bark of fallen log and insect-haunted least willow, the song…

Caveat

“I will no longer shout that I am not Absorba the non- Greek in public places. It was only out of the catching enthusiasm of a real steakhouse atmosphere that I begged you to be my Jean d’Arkansas. We can live life without the constant encomium. “When I hear the sword of Zorro in the…

Gloomy Sonnet V

There’s no such thing as a rich sex life. Sex is poor. But sex isn’t the only thing That’s poor. Black-eyed Susans and purple loosestrife For instance haven’t got a prayer. The ring She wears causes a certain Platonic sting Like bonsai trees, which make me claustrophobic. Seeing her without it could make the angels…