Poetry

Clock Appraisal

The gear gold inside the golden-case clicks A hidden hour equal-to (an inch Of snow—between two hands, quartz-like—falls) equal-to The hour seen: jeweled-movement, minute-gear, in glass The main-spring winds the hour in the eye. One hour, measured twice: less equal seems The snow untracked to the foot-trod snow. I know. I know I know. I…

At Large

His anguish was the squeeze of strangers ravaging his language, English, his anger, strangled, snapped him free at twenty-one to choose a certain simmering neighborhood in the city for revenge, carnage, and split the scene with a new name, gunman, lavished on him by newsmen as he crossed state lines, tuning in. A small boy’s…

This I Call Home

Terrace Storms are inconsequential. A terrace always reverts, loyal subject, to the sun. Hallway A tunnel of betweenness. Here anything can bed anything. Back Fence I only wish it were higher. Don’t watch me. Front Porch Goddamn Astroturf, who’s it trying to fool? The one lone step, a mendicant slab— ungenerous to a fault, fatal…

The Unbosoming

I have been a day boarder, Lord. I have preferred the     table to the Bed. I have proffered, Lord, and I have profited, Lord,     but little, but not. I was Bored, Lord, I was heavy, Lord. Heavy bored. Hopeless,     Lord, hideous, Lord. Sexless. I was in love, Lord, but not with You….

Today’s Visibility

I don’t know what I was thinking taking us to the Museum of Surgery but we left very glad of anesthetic and the sky entirely uncut-open. Later, it was nearly impossible to see the haystacks because it turned out we were in the Museum of Museum Guards. One woman was eight feet tall, her head…

Poem

for Hilary In the lit room, an inkblot runs on a napkin like antlers into a three-quarter moon. Beginning to speak, I. . . gesture toward the ceiling, push my hair back behind my ear, wait— hearing a flower, red, blown by wind as on a prairie, in summer.

Untitled

Rooms I (I will not say worked in) once heard in. Words my mouth heard, then — be with me. Rooms, you open onto one another in the mind: still house this life, be in me when I leave, don't take from me what took so long.