Poetry

  • 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.

  • Prose Song

    Somebody medieval—the celebrated Anonymous of Bologna maybe—said that implicit in such an equation as 5=5 is the equality or equivalence (I for one get those two well mixed up) of all things fivefold, such that cinquefoil or quinquereme, let us say, can stand equally for a hand or a classic hand of stud or draw…

  • Rain

    When rain falls the crows shut their eyes and colors fade. They open them again in the darkness of their own wings. I stand at an intersection and let the headlights graze across my face. Leaves sink into sidewalks. Stores close, flags come down, but a warm wind rises through the grates. I want it…

  • November Life

    November like a train wreck as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire. The sky is a thick, cold gauze but there’s a soup special at Wafflehouse and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,…

  • Your Own Master

    The writer of our day has become especially repulsive recently by walking in public without his pants hind-end first and mournfully displaying to the world the place that hurts, and this place hurts him because he does not know where he can sit down peacefully. —Maxim Gorky Down the hill past the bakery you air…

  • The Lion’s Big Roar

    The radio voice speaks in French and so does the other radio voice. Kill the radio and the wind gets hot. In Wolf Point, the Sioux waitress with blue eyes and a figure like a bar of soap lets you change your order, but Delores won’t like it, she says. “Oh, I need about a…

  • Platinum Plus

    No nation of alienates, we. We do our dopamine dance in the kitchen, in phone booth and office, aided by pharmacology, hindsight, and when all fails, Zen. We no longer stop twice at stop signs, frantically patting our hips for our wallets. We frog-march from gray to shrill purple, breathing in shellfish, bee balm, fresh…

  • The Word Cock and the Sublime

    Memory of him begins in my mouth; finger whet red with Chianti, slicked around the rim of a glass half-full slips a harmonic: sere, sweet vibration a cricket would make if it could sustain its dumb broken one-note. Porch: evening low-slung from telephone wires. Wine on my finger, put to lips: a way of thinking…