Poetry

A Blessing

I rejoice in the poems not written: the cruelly discarded: the crippled, the asthmatic, the anemic: the poem about a photograph: about what love is like: about how strangely I felt that day: about something about me, noticed. Bless you, go on the ash-heap, that fine compost from muscle, blood, bone, which fuels surely the…

Obit

The lovely lady posted in red No Hunting. Last night the supreme hunter crossed the meadow, into the house, to the target.

Missing World

In the grand scheme of things, These words are smaller Than one pixel in a black And white photograph, A grain of sand, smaller Than molecules—no— Smaller than that. Zoom out, as in those old Science films in junior high, From one letter of one Of these words, out— To the room, above The house,…

Spider Time

I brush aside a spider from my arm, but he returns to scale the mountain of my knee, scuttle across my book, over page 64, and off the edge. Disoriented, thwarted, he pauses in the grass, then drops down, swaying from the tip of a green blade. Swooping from one to the next, the afternoon…

The Lilies of the Field

One of those early summer days, driving west on Carson Street, heading for parts unknown, singing aloud in my head, saying Lord, Lord, what am I to do? Not a heaviness in my heart, not a lightness in my heart, but the usual hum and rush of living in this city of bungalows and smokestacks…

Education by Stone

after Joao Cabral de Melo Neto To go to it often, to catch its level impersonal voice, says de Melo Neto in the graveyard’s moon-white orchards. To being hammered, the lesson in poetics, the speller of spells, he says. What did you learn standing with the east wind cutting over the fields of tilting stone,…

Mutating Villanelle

Because God wants us to have indefinite life, like Him, Richard Seed intends to electroshock an egg to implant his image and likeness into Gloria, his wife             (to implant into Gloria, his menopausal wife, his                      shocked image and likeness) after inducing quiescence in its nucleus (moon-pause) so his DNA might nest there and…

Overture

for Gabriella There had been a cricket in the basement when I dreamt you were an unopened envelope on my chest. I heard on the radio how silverware suddenly tarnishes in a drawer before disaster, tornadoes, sudden changes in weather. The voice on the radio, on the lookout, she said, “It’s beautiful . . ….

Peking Robins

At night you wake, not to seek me but to come to your self, a small song— here is your hand on the wall in the squares the porchlight makes. You are the day’s hard rain. It becomes you (and all the clouds in the pond). Tonight the fox is struck, the steeple reaches up…