Poetry

In this wrecking yard, our home I turn over to you, a garden you planted long ago with her. Prepared the space cleared, hoed, and seeded. Now in profusion from these rusted, twisted coffins her flowers And before her, you said there were many. Many. This time the exchange in books Home Gardens for poetry,…

Edge out on the thin quaking limb of Arizona, our lost farm, the desert stretched rimless from eye to end. A few stone buildings, weathered woodshed at the axle, then long spokes of wire sheep pens ray out along the dirt tracks that know Mesa and Tucson but stop at the world. The sheep huddle…

Satellites document a shift in an ant colony. A spy joins a circus—a clown leaps from a bridge. A prima ballerina loses consciousness after sharing a recreational drug called Ecstasy with a steeplejack. Both dream of snakes but the snakes swallow each other and there is not a trace of all this. I am in…

1. The situation is not going to change. Which situation? Anecdote of the moon. Held there, cast in a blitz of lopsided gas. Or say a row of trash cans. Something set to music, then lost. Four wasps on a sill; some stench. The last thing said. Say that. The smoke inert. Leaves Frozen at…

something to get her teeth in forget the shakes cancer patients are supposed to choose forget tapioca pudding. vanilla ice she wants what is full of blood something to chew to get the red color out of something she can attack fiercely my mother who never was namby-pamby never held her tongue never didn't attack…

Sometimes she calls me Chance and sometimes she calls me Desire. I was coming out of the laundromat wearing my little Graceland hat. What most astounded me on this particular day was the day itself, my being alive against such confusion, my being erect, one could almost say, as opposed to crawling all around the…

The first black sheet lies on the pond. The nursegirl takes us to search for her brother. At first her glass eye frightens, but as we stare at birch and dogwood night exposes itself and we can't see her anyway. We find the brother in the weeds smoking Pall Malls. She takes a stick and…

It is hard to begin with a death, albeit a metaphorical death, of what you thought would be your future. You look out as the rain pelts the mansard roofs of your neighborhood and think you could tell she was calling him to come to the phone while she was reading a book in the…

At low tide he appears, regardless of the weather. He's collecting the broken bottlenecks from the past century. Blue, green, brown and clear, each has a little story—it won't take a minute to tell—about a favorite beach in the South Seas, a sea monster as large as a house, a mad captain, a woman with…