Poetry

  • Daughter

    I hear her splintering like the seed inside the pine cone, the furious grease inside the smoke and speed of the fire of our bodies. The hard red seed of her, her pink nipple, her penis-husk, her odors and hairs, her molecular dust, her dream file, her first and last word, her undiscussed déjà vu's,…

  • Pilgrimage

    Today I returned To see those two worn-out and rumpled Representatives of the common world (Were they mother and son, Or did they merely resemble each other?) Kneeling in adoration Before the elongated Mannerist Apparition of the Virgin Bearing a chubby five-year-old Son of God Out of her sacred house And into the world As…

  • Philomela

    . . .by the barbarous king So rudely forced —Eliot, “The Waste Land” Aunt Phil was no fin de siècle brooched-up elegant with one eye always on the karat though she was almost married to several goose- bottomed men. I begin where the last had the balls to jilt her. She'd even put down a…

  • Gifts

    It turns out that I was supposed to eat the blue Hubbard squash I got for Christmas, lung-shaped refugee from the winter closing of the farm market, relic of a profligate ambition. My friend tied a red ribbon around its stem, and I thought it was dying, so I mourned it. I found a place…

  • Rubber Rats

    You know what it's like Sundays to wash, brush your teeth, pull on pants and sneakers then amble to the grocery a few blocks away for juice, milk, bagels, then carry them back, make coffee, toast—you know it. But the box of rats sitting on the counter as I left seemed all wrong, cruel, what's…

  • Worldly Beauty

    Skin deep, you son of a bitch, I thought, no more—but the impure Tip of his needle tracked its dance. The snake between the ribs, Anchor, tiger, the daggered heart, memento mori of the skull: In the heat of the body's refusal,                                                            I had to choose among images. Beyond the window, awl-points…

  • two from Oblivion

    but about death and women I've never known enough to really say, to help myself, to resolve, define, understand, to hear the voices crying, muttering, cursing in their endless soliloquy the subjectless theme of women, death, the source of all anxiety, the root I need to see, inspect, touch, Henderson lay his hand on the…