Poetry

  • Umbrian Dreams

    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…

  • Voice as Gym-Body

    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,…

  • Wind/Breath, Breath/Wind

    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…

  • October II

    October in mission creep,                                            autumnal reprise and stand down. The more reality takes shape, the more it loses intensity— Synaptic uncertainty, Electrical surge and quick lick of the minus sign, Tightening of the force field Wherein our forms are shaped and shapes formed,                                  wherein we pare ourselves to our attitudes . . ….

  • How I Got Born

    The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children.     Though it’s common belief That Susan Smith willed me alive At the moment Her babies sank into the lake   When called, I come. My job is to get things done. I am piecemeal. I make my living by taking…

  • Wind, Horse, Snow

    1. The Eskimo children balance their blackboards on their knees and write with soft fat chalk. A storm skitters across the frozen sea. Smidgeons of ice have swirled into pinwheels. 2. The painter Magritte is dabbing black paint on his canvas. Beneath the clock he writes “wind,” beneath the door “horse.” 3. The Eskimo children…

  • Three Poems

    Narcissist #1 I’m so amazing I could lick myself.   Narcissist #2 Did you see how well I licked myself?   Narcissist #3 I was so upset. They barely noticed the way I licked myself.

  • Black

    My favorite God a horse the color of my name. And when I ride him, a heat between my legs, like tongue on ice, friction of moon against darkness. Over and over, the hooves, the rain, finding the ground. Hearts, black boots flung there in the mud behind us. And all around us, the leaves…

  • Her Body

    1. The Fingers They are small enough to find and care for a tiny stone.         To lift it with wobbly concentration from the ground,                 from the family of stones, up past the pursed mouth— for this we are thankful—to a place level with her eyes         to take a close look, a look…