Poetry

  • Meurig Dafydd to His Mistress

    No word I huffed when Stradling urged the squire to throw my eulogy on the fire. The fiddlers laughed. I, snow-silent, proud, did not melt. But I'm spitless now, my pearl, my buttercup, my bread-fruit. I rattle their silver in my pocket. I have other stanzas for harp and lute, other gullible lords to flatter….

  • To the Storm’s End

         In my most recent book, City Life, I used interlocking dramatic monologues to develop a plot and subplot. Finishing it gave me the impetus to experiment with shaping a musical structure out of inter- locking sequences, each sequence resonating with the others.      To the Storm's End is one of the sequences I'm working on in…

  • Self Portrait

    Lying impatient for the burning copper thread I wake next to me on the too narrow for two bedcage. One of me his eyes squinched ankles crossed I do not wake him he is scrawled with tubes. One of me (me) a mess of broken glass circuitry sheet metal plastic a fist-sized magnet. Hungry this…

  • The Past

    Where did she come from, that dig in the ribs? Who is she to pretend she's me and to take on that ditched-in, hopeless tone? Who is this phony yokel? This two-dollar bill, this pig knuckle? Honey, I tell her, my name is Lynn Collins Emanuel, someone whose whole manner says, I'm over-educated but recovering….

  • The Brighter the Veil

    The brighter the white veil the more daring the modesty. The yellower the dandelion the more rampant the growth, the health careening toward unveiling. The louder the wheels the deeper the plough sinks in the black field. The darker the soil, the more water it holds and the deeper the plough, the louder the clank…

  • Aborted Fetus

    Now that I'm gone, my pale boy-body near your ear, my skull-white forehead used up, out beyond the lamplight, a Cain trembling on tiptoe, desperate, mute in shadows, yearning down to hear you read aloud from your stuffed armchair, I'd die to point to the art print lifted from a motel wall on the move…

  • The Dig

    Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the      Rock gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at      the café where they drink their thimblefuls of hot tea, beyond the valley with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of      irrigation, and someone incising a…