Poetry

Day off in dark suit & hat, looking though the viewfinder of a new eight-millimeter Bell & Howell camera, paying no mind the open windows, the seizure. Just how more than half the targets on the grassy knoll are potential customers, models, women, how accident & aim could fit them all, including the car, into…

Not that you were too young to die, though thirty-five is too young, and not because they killed you in the middle of the night the most premeditated way. Not exactly that you didn't deserve it, either, having shot an old man to death for his rare coins and wasted another for money whose sister-in-law…

Kennedy Playground Washington, D.C. We forced our faces into the circular frame a stringless hoop made, hoping more than silence & light would fall through. We fought for position. We fouled & shoved. We high-fived God. Our Converse All-Stars burned enough rubber to rival The Devil & his mama. Hoop, horseshoe, noose. We aimed at…

Midwinter you can see past the trees, white oaks and tulip poplars, tops golden in the low sun. Today, not a cloud. The old fireroad leads up Old Raggedy, up to boulders and the sheer outcrop silver with snowmelt. What matters lasts a long time: rock, timber, streambeds with predicaments where the water falls. But…

for Thomas Cripps Like a clothesline of whites colored hands couldn't reach, a thousand souls crossed promised air, & the screen glowed like something we were supposed to respect & fear. Daylight & Sunday were outside, waiting to segregate darkness with prejudices of their own. A silhouette behind a flashlight led us down an aisle…

I dream of a crowded street where I break A kiss into your mouth; instead my windows Are darkened with curtains and in fear I want to hide you, your sigh, my hand Cupping your fast breath so those who walk by Will not hear. We do even this honest thing Wrong and lie down…

your open legs a tree where I leave messages like a failed monk with new prayers waiting it out in the small clearing to stay in wilderness without trembling to lean into a covenant of branches no one can redeem the part of lying awake near your offered wrist yet I might split you with…

The light that fails to stop him from staring Into the fire, the way her head is lowered Between her arms until the shoulder blades Emerge up into half-wings. The light That refuses to qualify as an act Of kindness, her mouth that does not speak. Also the meadow with the one faithful Tree standing…

“Dead Confederate Solder” —Gardner, Catalog #554 Around him is battlefield litter, dew-swollen lumps of a spilled powder. What is it? And the strips of cloth. Left behind the lines of men that advanced or fell farther on or hid somehow on this trampled field of Maryland grass. By chance, at the extreme upper edge of…