Poetry

  • For Joseph Cornell

    Not to arrive and not to ever know how to arrive or how to live even here on Utopia Parkway in Queens. This is for the Soap Bubble Sets and the Sun Boxes and for time that moves like a silent film through a projector and for the eyelids of the blind and for those…

  • Conduct of Our Loves

    There's kind of sky below the ocean— a field of starfish, turning slowly like cogs inside a water-watch, wound by a sea river; the star's five fingers tremble and reach for a clam's book of meat, into which it will inject a sedative and then its stomach. In The City, escaped parrots colonize a hilltop…

  • In the Belly

    Dad pays him to teach me the boy thought as the old man watched from behind jib— The cool burnt cherry from his pipe sweetened the ocean smell, its spoilage and cure of brine. On tack or coming about, the man was practical, oracular: Weight the gunwale on close hauls. Don't luff. He read out…

  • Lazarus

    Before the intervention the exhalation had begun. The spirit hid within the ear, and what he felt, therefore, became what he thought he heard. The place they had placed him in pressed in upon the drum. It sounded like a sandy bank, a gravelly run of waterway, reeds whispering at the bend. When the mill…

  • There

    Water, bone, bed, bedrock— whatever is underneath, below what's below. Sudden touchable quiet, shadow of a shadow. Weather. Sadness turning ordinary. Nameless illness coming on. A knock at the door so gentle it could be anything. Distance. The just thing not said, or said too late or said exactly and without mercy. Wind rising. Whatever…

  • Zapruder

    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…

  • To a Condemned Man Now Dead

    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…