Poetry

The city is still the same handful of glances, Glimpses of alleyways like wounds laid open, Balconies of laundry drying, names of streets Unfolding in the smells of fishscale, kelp, And poverty . . .                           Across Fleet Landing, sheets Of blind-white glare seethe off the spires and stairflights Through me, through my sea-pitched, sea-numb…

War Relocation Center” in a Dream   A lotus is a lotus. A train is a train. No, this train is a lotus, this lotus is a train.   The petals are white swords. The engine a head of steam. No, petals are spumes of ash blooming from this train.   The bud opens to…

Work boots in the basement thrown against a wall. The garden dies in the mind— nasturtiums entwined on a chain-link fence. The gods he carried nothing but dried crusts. That vintage bottle on the table crushed more each time he hammers it.

So autumn comes to an end with these few wet sad stains Stuck to the landscape,                                        December dark Running its hands through the lank hair of late afternoon, Little tongues of the rain holding forth                                                                   under the eaves, Such wash, such watery words . . .   So autumn comes to this end,…

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” —Janis Joplin But when you lose it’s only you and the hard wood maple floor beneath you, your shoulders pinned down, wet shirt on a     clothesline by the knees of a god leather-clad in medieval thigh-highs. He forces you to repeat or he’ll show you…

Bird shit streaking down the backs of Adirondack chairs, a naked woman sketching. Is the point of art to know what hands will do? For a moment she looks up, then resumes.

Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in Charlottesville, Umbrian sackcloth,                                  stigmata and Stabat mater, A sleep and a death away, Night, and a sleep and a death away— Light’s frost-fired and Byzantine here,                                                                aureate, beehived, Falling in Heraclitean streams Through my neighbor’s maple trees. There’s nothing medieval and two-dimensional in our town, October…

In order for a rapprochement with the physical body Only necromancy could be behind it. Racked on a stretcher the I.V. tubes string me up like a cello without a player   Only necromancy could be behind it. These days of horse-drawn betrayal. Like a cello without a player I’m caught, a crown of thorns,…

But later, to teach myself humility I worked exclusively with breath, with the insubstantial, with what does not last, not leave a record behind those streamers, those ribbons we trail from our bodies banners, flags of the living excrement of the mouth and lungs, though we do not like to think that the spirit is…