Poetry

Fatherhood is like dying. A flood of days pools at the neck. Glub. He was born on the th of June. In the movie version, ghostly Jennifer Jason Leigh sits at the bus station, strung out, penniless, blowing cigarette smoke at the bruises on her distant, fetal legs, and dreaming of an Academy Award. Careful…

       Colors get married and dance steps try            but a dance step is selfish. Diagrams                 make dioxin look like a six-sided   dance with carbon prongs but dance steps               won’t build up over time. Some of                 the white leaks out, a strangeness     we can’t recognize till marshes resemble these rheumy stanzas but unchosen. Dioxin    likes breast…

for Gregory J. Pamel, M.D. Dawn is ugly, a fug over day, a tarpaulin on a top-of-the-line motorcycle. An amaryllis has a hideous nativity: two shoots peer from the bulb frantically as a chick peers out of its ovular jail. Beginnings are rarely pretty: think of sperm, woolly mammoths, pre-atmospheric goo. Beginning, too, is the…

A deer was on Linwood and I asked the forest to come and retrieve her, curl its slow hammers around our houses and decipher brick into scraps of clay. My hardest wishes are for and against ourselves, delicate locusts, ravenous flowers with an appetite for even the breaths between the spaces. Say you are alone….

Say that moment crossing over isn’t heard Say the hammer-anvil-stirrup don’t unfurl Say the balance was upset Say this balance was upset Say the outside world doesn’t ring Say the mind’s ear listening to an odd man singing Say the moment crossing over starting somewhere out and in Say the balance was upset Say this…

I hate the psyche. Cloudy today: brown, carmine, and blue. I’m having a devilish time controlling my body’s two gods: theatric, tutelary. Last night I decided again to be a maniac, risking brain fever, like my father, whose temperature once rose to 108: impressive. In our house, only the sick were great.

Annual festival of the god of reborn souls and abandon, The young drunken one who dies and in springtime rises: From all over the City families come to the great amphitheater Bringing picnics of roast fowl, rounds of bread, cheeses, Preserved salt meats, clay jars of wine and citron water, Feasting all afternoon on the…

for César Vallejo To speak with a simple mouth. No more big words. Bread works. Butter, a long walk by the river works, salt, fog, wood. I know how to turn myself cold, to cut everything off— I can slice my heart to minnows, but it’s my wish to remain alive, God with and without…

Cryptic owl on my sill, olive branch in the gold-bowered cope, when I was a child I didn’t know what the word “colleague” meant: darkness? My father had many colleagues; I had none. I told his assistant, twenty-one years ago, “I wonder which I love most, words or music.” I can’t remember her advice, though…