Poetry

on the art of William H. Johnson i.  Florence, South Carolina—1915 Harlem she said or he thought she said she and every other hotel in town. Stopped dead on the wooden walk outside her white porte-cochère he watched the red sun roll into her rooftops. She said Harlem     or was it the bark of steam…

I say Jason, look at this book, but feel like I’m in a dream he’s having, a ship at anchor off the island he is that dispenses words like boats to shore. He knows better than to talk. So, I ask, Jason, do you like to read? and lift the cover, letting a few pages…

She wakes, alone, on the cruise ship’s highest deck, lying in a chair, beneath the night. Despite his promises, he isn’t there. The night is cool with patchy, floating fog; the ship, deserted, seems to drift without direction. Tonight, she’d rushed into Brindisi, the harbor city of pestilence and quakes, and bought her ticket and…

After Kirs in tall glasses at the Café Dupon, we roamed the cobblestone streets, each storefront window a stage, empty save for its props and the dark behind them. A boulangerie every block, five blocks to the bus stop. He’d persuade me to drive in his Peugeot, a silver compact stick shift. Angers at night,…

Yesterday, another dog collapsed, this one endlessly carrying slippers and bones. If I don’t leave here now, I’ll die here, the ascent to town less than one hour and my car headed Away, but stalled, surrounding temperature so extreme my skin can’t distinguish winter, summer. In just one hour: carrots for sight, beets for blood,…

Say I’m a man of fifty-three years, flexible in my thinking, yet shaped by certain heavily reinforced concepts about my relationship with the world. Say I’m someone who cannot speak seriously for long without blurting a phrase, some winking word curve that proclaims I’m ready to ride pleasure all the way to reverence. Okay, I’m…

Its gauze tent Is big as a heart or hand, Filthy with dots like black sand. These are its seeds, eggs, which in gooey, Furred translucency have already sucked in Twigs and leaves as good as dead, And will turn into striped, Puffy, segmented worms, Whiskered and spotted zinc, Umber and crimson. The tent’s tissue…

I keep seeing him as the tiny chill of sound rising out of a black groove, this record and its mist of scratches, and imagine it would have pleased him, to think he could escape this planet alive. Or the other notion, how he is more needle than sound, that a piece of him lies…

It was born white. It lay in bed Between its father and mother Kicking its tiny feet, so pretty You wanted to suck them and all their piggies. The mother kept looking nervously at the father, Hoping the little lie made him happier. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “It’s you I love. The…