Poetry

Discord

Never discount what began his wanderings. In Athens he was the greatest craftsman. So much work he had to hire his nephew to help him. But his nephew had his gift   and soon people claimed the nephew’s gift was greater than the uncle’s. If the uncle built with bronze, the nephew built with gold….

Flight

for my great-grandfather We ran from a home                                   we never saw again. Saw nothing                                               remain ours. My arm shot               from my body. My wife’s broken neck. Our son burned                                 into a wing of smoke. A peeled face boiling with flies.                                             A man tearing his gangrened leg off              with his…

Icarus’s Flight

What else could the boy have done? Wasn’t flight both an escape and a great uplifting? And so he flew. But how could he appreciate his freedom without knowing the exact point   where freedom stopped? So he flew upward and the sun dissolved the wax and he fell. But at last in his anticipated…

Blemished and Unblemished

Say genius is one side of the mountain, then is vanity the other? Consider Daedalus after he escaped from the king’s prison. The king pursued him. He had many jewels   but Daedalus was brightest. Of course Daedalus concealed himself. The king went to his lesser kings and set them a task. He gave each…

Pismire Rising

Mealy-bugs, shootflies in squadrons, mites. A leech sucks your ankle. A slug slides up your leg; curdled ooze, the glue in the globs of it, leaky muck and swamp water, a lacy scree of green laid upon its surface, glug, glug, mush and slough, bug manure. Each step each leg lugged from its last footprint:…

Cassandra in Connecticut

Some read what’s left in teacups, Or soothsay cranium bumps, or Tarot cards. I read leaf shadows on my neighbor’s house As morning sun brooks down among the poplars Blown by a strong eastern wind. Here’s Count Basie Playing his piano. Here’s a buggy ride. And there’s a wolf devouring a man of God. But…

Last Wisdom

So often in this world what is rejected creeps back to the heart, what is cast off again jams the brain. Remember Daedalus, at the end of his life, gone to Sardinia as builder for the son of Hercules. But faces fretted his memory and he began to make bronze dolls with moveable limbs, forming…

Praia dos Orixas

1. Farther north we came to a place of white sand and coconut palms, a tumbledown government research station, seemingly abandoned, no one in sight but sea turtles lolled in holding tanks along the edge of the beach. The ocean was rough, riptides beyond a shelf of underlying rock, water a deep equatorial green. We…