Poetry

  • Gossip of the Inner Life

    My good friend who these days despises the newspapers Complains this isn’t news but gossip,                                                                 a talking down, In brief sidebars, in the mathematics of The intellect, from the highest To the lowest common denominator, The front pages with their treaties signed and breached In an afternoon, the borders Fixing and unfixing themselves Like…

  • Sigh

    I sighed this morning, a slow deep inspiration that dragged the air into the recesses of my lungs, portions I imagine had been forgotten in the last few months. And then for a second or two I felt the life pass out of me. As if it were a prelude, a taste for the sake…

  • Memorial Day

    My father, an American, was singing in dialect over the grave of my great-grandmother. The sun was setting. The country was in another war. My mother was planting nasturtiums over Nonna’s grave. Her green skirt was shorter than the grass. A northern shrike was piercing a songbird on a thorn of barbed wire. The old…

  • Pastoral

    We don’t want to be shown, in photographs sent home, What the poet saw that summer, that evening In the mountains with the shepherds, that unspoiled Landscape with its caves and weathered ruins, Nor to be retold, in long scribbled letters After the wine was drunk, drunken revelations Of the shepherds’ joys and troubles, no…

  • Pinguid

    I came across this word unexpectedly. It means fatty, greasy, unctuous—I can’t say exactly since I’ve not seen it before. That’s the beauty of language—such surprise and variation, each synonym a slightly different meaning. I think of unctuous as a wormy, mealy-mouthed flatterer; greasy, a male: disingenuous, pomaded, cigarette dangling from mouth. It’s in these…

  • The Black Shoe

    Newlyweds, up at the Del Mar station, saw the woman stumble & fall, & ran back to pull her to safety, the train bearing down. For a thousand feet north of the point of impact, investigators found parts of a briefcase, sketches of gowns, a low-heeled black shoe. From the White House, the President screaming…

  • The Twelve Hats of Napoleon

    In the painting the twelve hats look pretty much alike. Tricorns, they’re called, and when studying them in their invisible grid, one inevitably thinks of his face. An allegory about Napoleon: The parts of his face had always hated each other. Like wild stars in a burning sky, many-a-time they came dangerously close to colliding….