Poetry

Their speech doesn’t sound prophetic: “Wish the damn heat would let up.” “Do you carry three-inch finishing nails?” Too late their wisdom becomes clear. True prophets, though, care nothing for prophecy. It just sweats out of them like garlic from the pores of one who eats Korean food. Prophets adore food which is thoughtfully prepared….

Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair, you are a bloom of uncombed hair. With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals, I make a clear cup of sky. Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue. I am a body of empty husks. Indian corn is in your hair, the…

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…