Poetry

The sun came to in late December. Spring seemed just the thing that flattered into bloom the murdered shrubs along the splintered fence. The awnings sagged with puddles. Roads were streams. Wet leaves in sheets streaked everything with rust. The man who raked his lawn transferred a toad too small to be a toad back…

“I will smash their guitar.” —Joan Miró   The force that drives the left-handed guitarist     Waking from a dream that again escapes me to play right-handed . . . immortality, frets     like the eyes of vermin. No sheep fold, no birth chords and stops, scorings, the music itself     lava, breasts, no color…

—a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, Canto XVII Remember, reader, if ever high in     the mountains the fog caught you, so you could see     only as moles do, looking through their skin how when the humid, dense vapors begin     to grow thinner the sphere of the sun     finds its way feebly…

Spring rain. Inklings, earthlings, wet present     The sequence of events, that’s what’s best, when the clots participles and shivers before red sun and cicadas     dissolve as from the drugs . . . or in your city, Santoria, snow cones, dubbed syllables     to hear the names, to have the characters cast down The…

for John Engman (1949–1996) Dear friend, I heard tonight by phone of that ghost bubble in your brain. It was not the pearl of balance one fits between lines in a carpenter’s level to make something plumb, but a blip in a membrane that burst so now             your fine brain is dead— that city…

War’s hell begins with a parade, high-stepping girls, the flag’s harem, Old Glory on its leash. In a corner of the flag is a token bit of night. We round up the stars, same as the boys. A blood-red flag— blood-blue, blood-white. Reality’s standard must never touch earth. Lining the streets, cheering, we forget how…

“Thy absence overflows the rose” —Hart Crane Because from the humid bed of August the afternoon held its blue arm out to me, I stood on a hill in Garretsville, Ohio at the headstone for Hart Crane— one shared by Clarence Crane, his father. As clouds removed all color from the sky, their shadows clarified…

After I’d filled the crystal vase with water, I thought of your ancient mother, who came once like a witch from a fairy tale to curse our uncertain union, how she stood at my sink and lectured on cutting stems at a slant under water             so the blooms would last— this after weeks of…

On Slaughter Beach I lay me down on the sand between surf and calliope, there where oceania meets glitz: plastic mosques and minarets and transvestals, sub- verts, countersexuals—Spanky Sparklenuts, Afterbirth Boy and Crab Apple, Candace the Grimace and She-Who-Eats-Only-Fish. Nighttime it was, brine-sour, my head sunk in shadow. Above, boardwalkers walked—catcalls and titters. Such was…