Poetry

to Grandmother, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, August 1991 I bear down on the leaf that carries me to home and ground, peer through a corner, see the gaze that slipped in and out of walls at home, bared, looking at the valley, a brown wind that uncords knots, binds storms to dust, lifts stars, skies, the abscess…

A few sounds, over and again, grip me through this     drunken mess. I walk to the oblivious road, gone and done for. A few beats of my pulse splinter through the plates     of my skull. The gun blast, I do not know where the bullet hit or the depth of my wound. My…

My brother, my son, they’re setting jack posts, stringing wire in high wind. I come after, pounding staples in good pine wood. We follow the edge of the jack pine where the foothill opens out to long drop after drop of tough grass sliding down the Front Range. We know it’s a fine day, a…

i. Between the confluence of the rivers, the smolt twist and die in massive turbines. Liaison between the proliferation, Nusoox and all the commissions, Yowanswickt watches the roll of dice, pitched in bone games, about irrigation, treaty and young, vulnerable fish. Dialogues with usurpers who are loquacious and convinced of the real in terms of…

Magpie calls bounce off the brittle branches flaring off the mountain’s dark. One’s wing just flew across the branch tips. Just the banner of himself he drew across. His darkness cast a kind of laugh against the brilliance of the icy bark. I remember iced branches out our window fifteen, sixteen years ago an ocean…

1. He looked at the seed for a long time. His mind did not comprehend. It did not flower anymore. The seed was just a seed.                                            She had said it was begonia. He tried to imagine what begonias looked like. Purple blossoms, rich yellow, supple orange, blue petals? The mind that made the seed…

If Earth is one of seven ancient wandering stars, where is that girl who, every afternoon,        runs water into a basin of hollow scales? Surely not in the vertical crowds, among colonizers and women passing in shallow hats. Nor riding with the plutonium makers, without hair or     explanations,        whose buckles glow in…

There was a time I wanted nothing so much as home. In the rain I loved you, in the hot days; The corn ripened; I was a child of storms And of seasons. I ventured and was lost, But, oh, those salty songs of the damned! Death has a green foot, And we dance like…

The trees, so white and so many. I don’t remember it this way. Their slender trunks a comfort. You surrender, that’s all. To a man, to a drug, to wall after wall of birch. It’s not unpleasant. Winnie, steel-gray in October. Whitecaps. This is where nostalgia will take you: a mean wind, a sleety snow…