Poetry

for Roger Erickson Language, I have wanted you to have a body that knows itself; I have wished you could sing in the tempo of my last inclination. I have wanted you made of metal or oil, or soil— I have wanted. I have wanted. Language, it has taken years, but I have made my…

They took me to see the Emu of wonder eat out of a sack. They took me to see the Pronghorn pronking endlessly. They took me to see the White Hart at night, lit by headlights. I hiked to the top of the falls to see the Coho surrender. I heard the Pekinese suffering behind…

Vaporous carousels passing soundless: man on lawn under brother-clouds. Swollen-breasted red robin present then gone, back to pick such reeds with a friend. Beak’s-work done, their cries are hatched, perhaps brought on by the man, perhaps of vectors sprung from the hectic mind that makes a bird’s tail swivel into radians, as if, fast upon…

I arrive again in the right place but with the wrong set of objects: a keyboard with four or five letters rearranged (in a crooked row) so it’s hard to keep things from coming true by accident. The nerves scrape feeling from the heart sac and refer it to skin on the left shoulder. The…

I’m smoking a cigarette and having a drink with the only woman who’s right for me. I’m telling her a joke that isn’t that funny but we laugh anyway as if it were, and then it is. Ideal forms are everywhere, the chairs on which we sit, the windows to our left and right, our…

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…

The tines I used were basically the same. The line that read, “My blue eggs never hatched,” was fabricated, yarn of passion, play. I never laid an egg. I never lived a past, unmitigated life. (I think.) Of course, there was that time my childhood stopped its beating—Mother sat me down to preach her strictures,…

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…

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…