Poetry

“The Prime of Life” is one section of Scattering Carl, a book set at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts from late spring to mid- summer, 1978. The book has the form of a journal—prose notes and meditations, poems and poem fragments. It is a fictional journal, a made-up journal, a falsification and strenuous…

Bare grapevines hang like a waterfall before the sun— Sky the cold color      of blown breath. Cats weave, wearing their Etruscan smiles, through the smudgelight and the brush. It is a January of mist and war. Bombs falling on Baghdad and the streets of Israel. The fruit of the old year eaten, and the seeds…

Maybe it was because the only time I hit a baseball it smashed the neon cross on the church across the street. Even twenty-five years later when I saw Father Harris I would wonder if he knew it was me. Maybe it was the demon-stoked rotisseries of purgatory where we would roast hundreds of years…

Something is wrong.      Something is always wrong within the shush and chaos of the valves, measured drumming in the stirrups of the ear, systole and diastole, something is wrong in the sickroom of the body, & deep in the marrow the cells are born deep in the marrow the cells learn fight How clever the…

In the year 1946 a young sailor came bounding up the stairs, leapt into the kitchen, and with his arms spread out, exclaimed, “I'm home!” We stared at him silently. Mother, brothers, and sisters. But not his mother, brothers, and sisters. “Sorry,” he said, “wrong house.” I wonder what became of him? Is he still…

Here is the infant formula plant missed by a hair's breath next to it here is the biological research facility bombed with advanced machinery of pinpoint accuracy Here are the small women and large babies the medium-sized women with tiny children and the large, the tall women with shrinking babies and here are the former…

Wyoming, 1943 Someone clever has carved a deer out of a scrap of wood and set it on a table or shelf inside a shabby room among a file of barracks, along a street of sleep. In its miniature dawn, its hues are gradually revealed, its legs regain their poise, its eyes open. Someone clever…

yesterday, in new york city the gravediggers went on strike & today, the undertakers went on strike because, they said, of the overwhelming number of corpses stretched out on tables in the overworked, embalming rooms (unnecessarily, they said, because of wars & plenty stupid killings in the streets & et cetera & et cetera, et…

1 Immigration Master Oki played the word from its scabbard, counted by tens, shouting the colors of decades. Centuries are best worn with their collars showing, he gibed. Grab time by the neck, make it speak truth while the record plays and the money's unspent. He crawled into a season, its leaves were damp and…