Poetry

At Kwik-Fill, I pump ferns and turtles into my tank. They'll ride here in my dark until they burn. Millions of years later, now, our traffic traverses ancient landscapes, zone by zone, desert by forest by marsh by swamp until we sleep. At night, like you, I almost remember riblike sprays of cattails, pterodactyl eyes…

Once she stuffed me with aspic in the days when I felt I should return invitations. After all, she was my teacher. Her tongue lashings burst as waves of hives on my belly. I'd eaten her lethal low-calorie jelly. When did she eat her jelly doughnuts? Not near me. When I spoke out of turn…

Harm soup simmers on each body's woodstove where gelatin soaks from shinbones and combines with effluence from cabbages of loss to build gray froth. Nouns of perpetual accumulation sip woe three times a day from a wooden spoon as machines doze in the separated hayfield. There are no shadows in this blue country. Woe's nutriment…

IV. Finding Her These poems are from the final section of a book called Death Tractates, which is a sequence of poems written after the sudden death of my closest female mentor. This work interrupted the writing of another book. Bright Existence, and now stands by itself. Many of the poems have rather abstract titles….

Talking and joking late at night: the rain pocks the air conditioner, blocking the traffic so the apartment remains like a lakeside cave we've come home to after the performance, as if we are docking, while fooling around, but not falling out, a rowboat to its place, and scampering home to the stone stools we…

Rain today, rain tomorrow. Today we shotgunned a copperhead coiled near the front porch, blasted it in half and the head end crawled under a log. Yesterday the Supreme Court said it wanted to kill or enslave my daughter. I exaggerate, I always exaggerate. I cleaned the shotgun with a wad of oiled rag and…

Sono sempre d'avviso che Shakespeare fosse una cooperativa. Che per le buffonate si serviva di cerretani pari a lui nel genio ma incuranti di tutto fuorché dei soldi. Non può ingoiare troppo la sopravvivenza. A volte digerisce un plotone, tale altra distilla poche sillabe e butta un monumento nel secchio dei rifiuti. Produce come i…

Lost in Gravedona without a map, You ask directions in handicap Italian of a stout old woman. She laughs, “Stop struggling, come in, And whilst I think them out, I'll make us tea And, if you don't mind, have a chat with me For I'm half-Welsh, half-Genovese.” Her father built this house, planted trees “That…

Too conscious of our need for pillows, he rises from bed to walk the street. No need, he thinks, for underwear or other gauze to dress his soul. Because he is alone this late at night we can forgive his need for walking out beyond his robe. He is that near to seeing himself as…