Poetry

  • Mercy

    An absolute sound, this soughing above the tops of trees. For the longest while I couldn’t look up, so much did I long to see the ocean, rough and whitened. Such soft ululations, such a drumroll of feathers! Yet it was no other weather than Wind. I looked up; the sky lay blue as always,…

  • March 30

    Eighty-one degrees a record high for the day which is not my birthday but will do until the eleventh of June comes around and I know what I want: a wide-brimmed Panama hat with a tan hatband, a walk in the park and to share a shower with a zaftig beauty who lost her Bronx…

  • My Fathers, The Baltic

    Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here a century ago, a nameless disaster, perhaps a voyage to the lost continent where I was born. Now the cold winds of March dimple the gray, incoming waves. I kneel on the wet earth looking for a…

  • Set Piece

    The infinitive is a conservation law. Not to mention all the other things Without which we would have been lost, Like the diamond engagement ring Or the parsimony of the rich. A different context is a different play. The girl in the coffee shop Was a woman onstage. Timor mortis conturbat me. Philadelphia left me…

  • The Great Submarine Race

    It’s mad, but it just might work, he said, and floridly signed his name to The Great Submarine Race. Submarines slumbered in his bloodstream and submarines burbled in shallow slips. The Flying Electrons bore the news around the world on cold white drafts and the news pierced the blue clouds. A man in the square…

  • Inc.

    I stroll among wounded merchants’ daughters. What to buy? What to wear? The questions dreadless enough. I take them down from their posts. Heart cuff, woodpecker wing, suit-so-sorry. News of the repeating, damned repeating. Circles the sky. Once I tried crooning and fell apart simply. The girls in slit skirts made an art of revealing….

  • Dark Room

    1. His camera absorbing the veld to expose its slow, tectonic motion, to let the inevitable gazelles graze the film as he rests easy, sleeping in emerging wheat . . . 2. Six years they coexisted in his case, symbiotic within silver slivers, as if forsaking faith in days to date in the negative. 3….