Poetry

We hate the future in early fall. You are worn and I am sorrow if sorrow is a woman who cannot see. Tell me our story. Were we perfect at seventeen? Did we make love in a hotel shower while someone nearby knocked and pleaded into the night? Did you visit New York in mourning?…

The overrated owe a great debt to the little: the pinpoint feet of shrimp unleash the tide pool billows. The mismatched flecks within the rock make granite glitter. Could the gnat impart the summer with her shimmer? Each spring the tightness of the soil is tirelessly relieved by the boring of a worm: she dares…

I didn’t want to only dream in black and white, but when the colors came back they frightened me, the reds I’d thought I craved, their technicolor poisons shimmering, an errant lens, a gauzy burning dress. Smooth forms deceive, give way to their own chaos. It seemed all equal signs had fallen off the earth—…

I am not seaworthy. Look how the fish mistake my hair     for home. I had a life, like you. I shouldn’t be     riding the sea. I am not seaworthy. Let me be earthbound; star fixed mixed with sun and smacking air. Give me the smile, the magic kiss to trick little boy death…

At that time I didn’t understand snow, the absence inside July, water and what holds the water in. Heard “It takes more than a forest to make a tree” in no one’s voice. By then the word meridian was extinct, echo without a face to place it, make it stay. Birds’ theories of heat hunch…

Whatever it once meant, no one remembers today. Trains run according to schedule. School is in session. No prophets, no candle-bearing crowds. The paper doesn’t mention. The public memory’s clean. The season’s all that remains: October, a liminal time before the souls rise. Once this date was inked on calendars; it guaranteed a parade. Even…

Drunk, her eyes would water and sparkle and she’d hold my jaw in her palm as though I were her child or dog, saying, Listen to me, Douglas. Don’t dare turn into one of these aging bachelor teachers. Then she’d reel off names of half a dozen doddering men in the physics and social studies…

My cousin does a wheelie in a muddied Mustang, radish red, parks askew at Quito’s, a clam bar where we drink beer, pine the days of seminary, LSD, Jimi Hendrix playing Strasbourg, the hours when all the Howes were stick-style architects, and every waterfront dry goods was built on ballast rock from Slave Coast turrets….

Just as, a stand of trees before you— you now sit turned sideways, on a trail rock, incidentally, listening to see what comes up, down, or out, if you do manage to contain your clumsy sighs, your leafy rustles—to pass the time you idly eye up one far pine to where a birch crosses it,…