Poetry

  • Avalanche

    for K. Curtis Lyle within an avalanche of glory hallelujah skybreaks spraying syllables on the run, spreading sheets, waving holy sounds, solos sluicing african bound transformed in america into hoodoo, inside tonguing blues snaking horns, where juju grounds down sacred chords up in the gritty foofoo where fleet rounds of cadences whirlpool as in rivers,…

  • The Sanity of Tomatoes

    1. Tomatoes are not a poignant fruit, not with their wide, affable faces, their compliances with the eager knife. They recline in slices on the cutting board, all their operations a success. Their miniatures pose shinily in salad bowls, beaded with moisture, bathing in exotic dressings. When you bite them whole, they squeal in delight….

  • Wrecking Yard

    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,…

  • from The Generations

    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…

  • The Other Alamo

    San Antonio, Texas, 1990 In the Crockett Hotel dining room, a chalk-faced man in medalled uniform growls a prayer at the head of the veterans' table. Throughout the map of this saint-hungry city, hands strain for the touch of shrines, genuflection before cannon and memorial plaque, grasping the talisman of Bowie knife replica at the…

  • Alone on the Mountain

    on my birthday I climb up here only to feel small again. Blue liquor of distances: one sip and I start to lose size, anger, the sticky burrs of wanting. If only, what if—let the wind carry it away. Wave after wave of shadow comes over the mountain, like some great migration. Up here everything's…

  • Muriel

    By the time we first met, you were the big-hearted poet, big in every way, breast and head, wrists and calves, but largest in the heart. And deep in the eye, grey like your hair, unlike those areas through which you moved as if on glass, unyielding in your big, gentle way, no longer that…