Poetry

—Plato, Republic The cold call of the cold to the cold Follows itself to the moon, To the edge of the storm, to the fold in the fold In the shrouds of the fallen-too-soon. The call of the cold to the never-held, The sung-over, the one-by-one Follows the moon to the world where the world…

The autumn aster, those lavender ones, and the dark-blooming sedum are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth with the remote intensity of a dream. These things take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see, everything I can think of. I want ordinary…

—Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour A chair, A nuthatch on the trunk of a walnut tree, The bloated belly of a dead deer, A man of seventy Grunting at toenails he struggles to pare. A woman In a straw hat over straw-textured hair Kneeling in a garden. What is not now departure will be. Foam on…

A punt, a water keg and some bottles washed up on the beach at Viareggio. Eight days passed before they found the body. The face and hands were fleshless, and everybody knows Keats’s poems were in his breast pocket, though what pierces me the most is how the book was doubled back as if the…

—Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society The man with the crooked dick strikes a match. The woman with one arm breaks into flame. The man finds a bird’s skull and wants to play catch. The woman hears the skull calling her name. He looks out the window. She looks in the door. He crushes…

On July 14, 1954, Frida Kahlo, who had swallowed the world whole, sat up in the crematorium cart and spit it out, her hair blazing like an aureole, her face smiling in the center of a sunflower before she disintegrated along with her seeds. The phenomenon of heat causing a body to rise has been…

Not far from San Diego steel ship containers packed with jeeps sit unopened and someone I know very well stands on the boulevard, surrounded by the pink and white stucco walls outside my window suspended in this moment between breathing out and     breathing in the men and women at Camp Pendleton relax their arms…

Sometimes I wish that I was still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids…

The June humid stars puff above the living giving our street the delicate shade of a sad mirror given to dark compulsion. How strange everything is when everything is so simple. The people of our street pace the spotlit sidewalks, they so not speak, they wait like patients wait for loved ones gone, gone. We…