Poetry

Portrait, Age Seven

It's not the wave that will devour you, arms and braids and all. Not even the stranger you won't look at in the shiny car. Not the topography of deserts, where you follow streambeds through the night, gobbling up the stars like sugar, ready to break the moon in half. Not even the mountain that…

The Other Alamo

San Antonio, Texas, 1990 In the Crockett Hotel dining room, a chalk-faced man in medalled uniform growls a prayer at the head of the veterans' table. Throughout the map of this saint-hungry city, hands strain for the touch of shrines, genuflection before cannon and memorial plaque, grasping the talisman of Bowie knife replica at the…

Alone on the Mountain

on my birthday I climb up here only to feel small again. Blue liquor of distances: one sip and I start to lose size, anger, the sticky burrs of wanting. If only, what if—let the wind carry it away. Wave after wave of shadow comes over the mountain, like some great migration. Up here everything's…

Muriel

By the time we first met, you were the big-hearted poet, big in every way, breast and head, wrists and calves, but largest in the heart. And deep in the eye, grey like your hair, unlike those areas through which you moved as if on glass, unyielding in your big, gentle way, no longer that…

Deaths I Come Back to

The lilacs on the roadside are rusting. They hold up clusters of lost light, soft brown stars that wrinkle and go dead. The deaths I keep coming back to send up a sweet smoke, the slow burn of decay. On the forest floor, pale vellum leaves; rain-tempered pine cones, stained with resin: pine branches drying…

The Name

Casting for blues my treble hook, troubled, as I think of it, acquired only seaweed. The junk fish swirled counterclockwise beneath the tiny pier chased into the air by blues in a feeding frenzy, pressing up from the shallow bottom, driving the school of mutt fish crazy with the herd impulse of natural participation. The…