Poetry

At seven a.m., nobody’s here but me and the pigeons and a few sparrows caucusing in his hair. Everyone knows how patient he was. I talk to him sometimes, but he never answers. “Good morning, Mr. Lincoln. I’m going to clean you up real good today.” His hands rest on the chair, yet I’ve seen…

I’m remembering the time you sat on a roof in Wisconsin to get away for a smoke, and a drunk senior stumbled to the edge of the roof to take a piss then folded his body down next to yours. Below, a faint sound of drums and bass throbbed through the house. “Pigs,” said the…

for Reynolds Price   This morning in my bathroom mirror, I glimpsed the slope of my shoulders, my chest thinning to a hint of ribs, the hair of my pouching belly black and beaded with water, and pondering myself limp and priestly, laced with blue veins, I judged nothing threatening. Sometimes, I admit, I even…

Almost winter and the groundskeepers are firing     blanks into the trees, scattering a nuisance of grackles from the branches—     Enough, say the guns, enough of all your excrement and birdsong, and the very sight is futility: great fistfuls     of black confetti, the way they soar out shrill with panic and return    …

You have seen vines climbing themselves, as though the moon were riding inside.                               Hordes of ants scooting along one spot and then scooting back again, sporting banners many times their size of butterfly wings. Consider an unruly nation, a revolution gathering forces, like this body of yours, wholly politic.               In its momentary congress, each…

Each flake is an old Cape Cod church with its steeple broken off. Still it is possible to locate a hymn within. I was handed a thin porcelain implement by a man prepared to die. He said, They are alike: the baton of the maestro, the whitestick of the sightless.

It is thicker than a woman’s hair. A boat tipped on its side spills a gift into the waters. The lake holds a hundred and two wonders in its still embrace. A cold wind wrinkles its surface like a spent sheet. You cannot write on it the way you do on a wasp’s hive. A…

He found them bedded in ice, in the frozen puddles     Among reeds and clumps of sedges in the marsh:         House and field crickets lying near the surface On their sides or upside down, their brittle hind legs     Cocked as if to jump as free as fiddlers         In the final rain before…

Laundry strung between high windows, bilious in breezy light. A circle of uniformed boys in a courtyard kicking a soccer ball, and someone upstairs practicing piano. In the dream a ceramic creamer painted with wild sunflowers. Streaks of rainbow plumage from small boats going away. Motor oil. Olive oil. Angels that leap from the mind…