Poetry

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:…

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…

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…

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…

I was spawned in lost waters. We all were, but because I can no longer walk, because this stillness halves me now, I know to hate why a bass pauses, hovers in still water, slime-thick and foul, beneath a rotted log. He is safe, he thinks, at a great distance from death, though it is…

The creaky rocker, the single boarder in his billed cap, the three-legged dog, the sick mother, the endless tasks that trickle down from the corner mills and shops. I have been bad. Even the laundry’s angry, I can see it snapping like big dogs on short leashes. And my punishment is this gray gruel, this…

The pine tree at the corner of the lot where my childhood home, a ranch house, sits like a snapped sugar wafer on a slope. Tents in Upton’s field collapsed and pushed aside for a game of kickball or just tumbling. The oldest Upton girl whom I adore, nearer adulthood than I, her head in…

It’s hard to manage privacy while using the machines: they are so public, and fully half of us are here wanting to show ourselves, wanting an audience for this one triumph—sculpted shoulder, sculpted calf. But to be seen deciding, Yes, the last repetition, to be seen flinching the weights up despite an amount of pain…

Mostly it’s the same odd obsession with nothing— the barren verisimilitude, the doggy fidelity to the natural world. So, this thrust of dark eloquence must be a yew, a non-deciduous blue-green talon grabbing attention. It could be that. Or Death. Or Truth. The abstract nouns stomp around the landscape in their stout boots. Meanwhile, the…