Poetry

You took the room in the attic. Watched television by yourself. I used to walk down the dim stairs to the basement to be with you at night, to listen to stories of plantations and dictatorships as you folded with precise care the underpants of my family. You who knew our human stains: faint arrowheads…

In a coffee can his flower beside loose bricks ledged on a city rowhouse gerrymandered for six kids, roosts of rooms, tilting floors, swayback roof sloping toward a Baltimore shipyard still as a world war watch Iggy Jones, old boilermaker, the belly on him, down to two cigars a day, living off the mailman’s pouch…

High. Mindless. Cackle at the edge of the world. And the geese are flying there and crying, for two weeks now they’ve come racketing each morning, miles and miles of them, pouring. Where do they come from, where did they sleep last night? I can’t see them, but the question ticks like a clock about…

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…