Poetry

Water Hot green plastic bucket Hole Rabbit in the wall of the ground Bone Rabbit, hip, shoulder Leaf      under a leaf of dust On my way to wash, The heavy buzz of flies like bees: There’s a carcass here. Rabbit. Eels Live to be ninety. . . An eel will eat your hand. I smell…

If only the nudes weren't so serious, but giggling, like the two little girls holding hands. They ask a woman absorbed by a woman, lit as though from the bottom of a pond, “Who painted the naked lady?” “Titian,” she answers, and the girls, still holding hands, jump up, skip, hooting through the sixteenth century…

All their sons are gone and my parents sit in their mountaintop kitchen. Language comes and goes like a far-off sound fading with a breeze. One cannot say “speak” and speak. A ground hog finds their cucumbers. In the valley fire finds a building. They call the smoke a scarf. But they know better. On…

We begin with a catalog of all the dead things seen or not seen in the way the eyes turn quickly away and return again furtively (was that a dog or a pile of trash swarming with flies?) The black rat in the stream drowned between two stepping stones the water washing through his coat…

Tonight I won't dance behind the ark. And if they pound on my door, the dancers with their torn shirts, their voices whooping over the storm, I will blow out the light and hold hands with sweet Michal in the dark. I know the people will come out to watch the ark pass like a…

To want is to rub out death. To smack its white skin with a stamp and then stare at the eggs. Spin a vase around, let it hiss like a top, and dismember hymns. Nature contains several planes, one of which walks balanced on edge, munching milk. To want is to collapse into ocean galleys….

The light wouldn't go away and he kept on walking In the sort of French a baby speaks Sometimes he forced himself to be spoken to sometimes not A woman dressed as a pre-teen may have asked a question They shuffled on the ocean floor in gentle parallel streams      opposed But not mixing cool salt…

The spine is a sea horse swimming in the body. The spine is inside-hair gone stiff. The spine leaks ideas the way cardboard leaks water. Submerged saw. Feller of forests. Felled by forests. The spine is innocent. The body is guilty. The spine is to the brain what the embrace is to the lover. Just…