Poetry

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…

It's staying light later, and through the pyracantha, Through memory and its prickly blood, A teenage boy combs his hair two healthy ways, A flood of rainwater flowing at his floppy shoes, The rain loosening the oils of the street, Freeing the clenched buds on a plum tree. He combs his hair. Something has to…

Try to think of Palm Springs as a breast, a nipple of dust crumbling on itself. I don't know how else to put it. The earth trembles beneath us like a loud cancer spreading, leaving scars everywhere. The desert is in bloom this time of year—purple and yellow flowers growing all the way to Nevada,…

reshuffling itself over and over again I, the I better than Elvis coming out the mouth of Jesus, knowing the fame which only comes from death. you explain. there is something muddy in the street. it rises in a fiery madness beyond pretense, says: I transcend. noticing itself, falls back from air to mud. the…