Poetry

It takes me a lot longer to write a poem I like, for three reasons: First, although inevitably I will, I can't consciously bear to repeat myself, so when I find myself writing about a subject I've addressed before, I stop in my tracks till I find a new direction to go. This, of course,…

Before there was anything else, solitude filled space in the form of gas—lavender, thin, smelling like mouthwash. When solitude studied itself in school, it turned into a sphere the size of a ball bearing, unbreakable, yet soft as beans soaked to make soup. When it grew old, solitude sprouted leaves like the winter oak's. Dead,…

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…

Gibbon, Tacitus, and Thucydides fished from a rowboat while it rained oysters. “Look,” said Tacitus, “it's pouring Rome's grief on my temple.” “No,” said Gibbon: “Phyllis has emigrated,” History takes correction from immaculate leopards who remain alive—but history retains nothing: it stuffs fact stew into its face, vomits, and gorges again, as the guitarist plays…

—So the soul had known it all along, the soul knew when it was taken: first it filled with light and then it went sideways, through boxes of radiance; you wanted her to look your way but she couldn't; for the bride can't just stop being the bride once the forward exit has begun, going…