Poetry

A noose of moonlight— I think I see what my father saw That night when he went out To the leaning barn— He followed the light, Scared up some rope in the tack room To toss over the beam.        The wind rending itself             through barbed fences. I found him The next morning, Kneeling…

Right now the men put aside     their composing sticks and settle by the hellbox     chatting in groups that never seem to vary     from day to day. Naturally I’m anxious to fit     in naturally, to be considered one amongst     metal men and composers. I hesitate on the edge of     the…

The bass we catch is too big with years, its dark stripes notched and wavering like a cut trunk’s rings. We drag it over the gunnel, stand back, and no one will touch it, at first. The children cry and want it gone. And when we do let it go, it is not out of…

“La poésie vit d’insomnie perpétuelle.” —Rene Char There’s a sickness in me. During the night I wake up & it’s brought a stain into my mouth, as if an ocean has risen & left back a stink on the rocks of my teeth. I stink. My mouth is ugly, human stink. A color like rust…

I was told to lie down in the cart, and I did. My braided hair mixed with straw under me to catch the blood I seeped. Then she covered me with heavy furs and brush. The night was stark and cold, the stars close and multiplying like cells as we creaked along under them a…

Saturday, Eighth and Broadway, a dozen turtles the color of crushed mint try for the ruby rim of a white enamel bowl on the sidewalk, wet jade jewel cases climbing two or three times the length of their bodies toward heaven till the slick sides of the bowl send them sliding back into their brothers’…

1. The one she loves she hates. And too late, she says, for the thing love’s become to let her loose from its grip. They take it to the hills. Green tent in blue mountains. They’d bought themselves fishing licenses, and the conversation began on trout—cutthroat and Dolly V’s—names bruised and asthmatically deep inside the…

I had been awake since balmy Tokyo on a train from lights of pornographic neon to places in silent mountains I will never see again. Across from me in the sleeper an old man undressed the veins in his legs looked like green lightning in hairless, gold skin. He wrapped himself in a robe moved…

In the ambulance a child is turning blue around the edges. The sweep of time has lifted up her life and we are a blur of hands trying to refasten her to it. Two fingers press a rhythm on her birdcage chest. The muscle clenched inside has a hole too wide. Time sweeps by like…