Poetry

  • 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…

  • Challenged in the Marketplace

    Challenged in the marketplace About the flagrant masturbation The philosopher said he was sorry He could not assuage his hunger as easily. This philosopher of the marketplace Once famously appeared With a lamp in the broad daylight In search of one honest man. It was always the marketplace Where of course he had nothing to…

  • WaveSon.nets 34–37

    34. How could desire outrun satisfaction? Who is constantly solicited, never satisfied, driven, forced to it, forced to instruct: an albatross at his neck, provocative bird, for aimless years above his conquering ship, on motionless wings, before it lit—or would have lit—on Ramirez Island where it had taken off. An albatross mates for life and…

  • Early Man

    Leaves came and went as men warred over the shape of the table— peace would be talked in Paris, where Ho Chi Minh had been young once, hungry and hunted. Veteran of another war, my father wanted no squabbles at the supper table. What shape should it take to insure that we were out of…