Poetry

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,…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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 . . ….

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…

You learned the intimate— to recognize faces, latch on to the breast, cry out your pain, smile into a smile —and you held that knowledge close in your strong reflexive grasp, as if under your fingers, those tender miniatures, a secret lay at the center of your palm. Now you unfist your hands and reach…