Poetry

  • Circling Disease

    The sum of things is the least of things. The dwarf loved the sovereign’s daughter repeatedly: at first, every morning, then he added on noon, then the army honed in like a giant umbrella. She was carried away like a dark subject until all that she felt and could not say hung like a nightworld…

  • Insomniac Voyeur

    There’s another man on my block who can’t sleep, I’m an admirer of his insomnia, it’s a tool like a glass of water is to thirst. In his case something like music is made, I know because my insomnia stalks his. Our street is lined with maples and has no streetlight and all the dogs…

  • Predawn in Health

    The stars are filtering through a tree outside in the moon’s silent era. Reality is moving layer over layer like crystal spheres now called laws. The future is right behind your head; just over all horizons is the past. The soul sits looking at its offer.

  • How Truth Works

    It’s a pious coil? It could be But you wait to be sure. Your hair blown back by Hope and teased by failure, You grope the lone desert for Sorts. You feel you know Pubic Hair.                   You want to sing The correlations between mosquito bites. You want to do math The way bricks do…

  • 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…

  • Begin Here

    O onion, o open, o equal-eyed quail egg with swell yellow lake. O dove and small love effaced by a late disbelieving. O even and anti some ever come sun fall, red gloves and the rest on a day, on a divan, a sofa, a longue bit of chaise flecked with lint speckled blue (only…

  • 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…