Poetry

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….

Put corn on the stove, don't burn the chops, sign all letters “love,” keep spotless above, clean up what drops. Put all knives away, you never know. Car in the driveway, wait in the doorway, your prayer here below unanswered again: he has not died. This man of men throws good food in the sink,…

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…

Yes What awful thing will I take on because you've asked? I can't say no. Too hard to ask? It's only one more awful thing that I'll take on and do it all until it's gone, except the thing will never go. What awful thing will I take on because you've asked? I can't say…

These poems and translations are part of a collaboration with the painter/monotypist Galen Garwood, with whom I collaborated on the book Passport (Broken Moon Press, 1989). Neither the poems nor the abstract images will function as “illustration,” but will interlock, exploring the fundamental wisdom-teaching rooted in the ideas of the great Northwest painter Morris Graves,…

She used to talk about divine laughter. I took this one of two ways. That the soul would be laughed at even in heaven, not kept out of the silver net exactly but as when the women at a school meeting laugh— at, not with—when they don't know how to enter your condition. But the…

     My basic continuous ‘work-in-progress' consists of a dozen or so simultaneous channels, which I draw upon in succession, daily. The channels are: dreams; sexual fantasies; sexual occasions; found images; improvisations and observations; first imagery notes (all these are in single spacing); prose drafts (1 ½ spacing); first verse drafts (single spacing); intermediary verse drafts (alternating…