Poetry

                                         for my father                                               1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He…

Mummified by gauzy July heat, my escape into the library’s neutral cool brings me to the dog-eared, thumbed-through news: “His failure was his greatest success,” says “Milestones” in Time magazine: “Died—Frederick Exley.” And then this prick of a hurt born of the aforementioned fact, and I feel it: Brain- muddled, maybe, but still functional—pulse flushes…

He could appreciate all The explosion accomplished, The tools they handed him, the manifold tools And their manifold applications. As I was starting to say—the explosion . . . A pungent lawlessness in the air, Like sheep ablaze. He found the barrenness Quite attractive, and said so, So that everyone heard, could hear, But not…

Poised in the garden just before dawn Souls hover in a trance before the window Or fly slanting and darting through the trees. And down on the plain where the sun Has yet to rise but whose heat roils Upward and turns the night to silver vapor, Souls swarm across the stubbled fields. Now, as…

Hazy Friday afternoon, traffic slugs. I get off a strange exit miles before mine hoping for the shortcut home. Between tenements, the sun’s intuition peeks through a pink bowling shirt on a clothesline. I project the night. After a shower, my evening peck—the click of plastic glasses— kids’ muted voices of cocktail hour— I never…

—suggested by John Searle’s thought experiment My one bulb may cast more shadows than light (the corners are always lost) but it proliferates in the red and black lips of my four thousand six hundred twenty-three lacquered trays, and I can see well enough to do my job. The room is compact. I can reach…

Though I’ve lived a life and I have lived amongst men and I have Loved this life as an experiment—an act of science And an act of ruth—I’ve kept for this city my last half heart (I lost the other to the chance of art.) And so, stirred of a         loud silence, Slow snow as…

My mother waited till now to hand down this gold razor her father let slip in the washbowl. In a hurry to teamster the horses, soap in his earlobe and nostril, he climbed into the fire wagon. When she poured the wash water onto pebbles, hard gold sluiced at the bottom with the whiskers. A…

for Gary Holthaus Seven geese, southwest, and seven flat-black ships, converging in the Colorado sky, before the pale haze of early winter, bright and bronze and empty, on a Sunday just approaching noon. I count the birds again: seven. And the helicopters: seven, in a line northeast, their rotors blurred and sounding faint percussion, high…