Poetry

  • Cicada

    For a week it’s been spinning the tale of a thing about to believe its new body. Today the eyes are gone, the center split where form sidestepped its own riven length. That’s just likeness hinged to the tree. A souvenir. A transparency. To find it now make a space in the ear in the…

  • In the House of White Light

    When my grandmother left the house                 to live with my aunts, my grandfather, who spent so much time in the sugar                           cane fields, returned daily to the emptiness of the clapboard house he built                 with his own hands, and he sat in the dark to eat beans he cooked right in the…

  • Broughtonia

    in memory of F.C. (1965–1991), who died of AIDS complications But there under the dark eaves of rain forest, we found Broughtonia, its crimson petals aflame, its yellow throat, veins hinting purple, rising to a sanguine corolla surrounded by sepals as crinkled as mourning crepe. We followed a path lengthened slash by slash, the islanders…

  • An Arithmetic

    Because the world insists on still giving and giving at six, mastering addition seemed its natural complement, a kind of cataloguing the earth’s surplus. I loved the fat green pencil shedding graphite as I pressed rounded threes, looping eights into the speckled yellow newsprint. Loved, too, the sturdy, crossed bars of the plus sign, carrying…

  • A Walk at Dusk

    after a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Come with me, toward the leafless trees. See the way they lean, dazed with fog and grief as they seek out one another in the haze? Isn’t that how we are able to go on—by believing all that matters will one day be revealed? That is why…

  • The Hidden Street

    The dogs have stopped barking. Even the grass has grown quieter, holding back from the wind. As you and I walk down the sidewalk, our voices are like a memory, whose deep purpose has gone inside, into the walls and floors and ceilings, where it no longer reaches the air but lies in wait for…

  • Orchard Bees

    Wrung-out, aching, caked with a sweat he wouldn’t claim, living the wrong life, he shook the branch until the last apple fell, never glancing at the others, whose backs, as they gathered, were as arched and gravity-clutched as his, their gestures in the limbs as solemn, as exhausted of flight. Bees drifted where he labored:…