Poetry

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…