Poetry

Charles and I go out together in his boat, which is a cat- amaran, in the burnishing weather, elated. so it's not surprising that in his boat, which is a cat at top speed among cats, this poem begins. Elated. so it's not surprising that we sing “Speed Bonnie Boat” to the winds. At top…

Remember when we were introduced to the only man in Oregon who had seen Diomeda cauta, the White-Capped Albatross also known as Shy, whose normal range is deep air deep off the continental shelf, and spoke of the Harlequin Duck, of Histrionicus histrionicus: Rather small, he said; mostly silent. You looked at him strangely. He…

When I eat crab, slide the rosy rubbery claw across my tongue I think of my mother. She'd drive down to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a huge car, she'd ask the crab-man to crack it for her. She'd stand and wait as the pliers broke those chalky homes, wild- red and…

With your silent, slender hand you put out stars. You give away my name like a bee does honey. Bite into me! You ignite my eyes. A distant sea of buffaloes in the green, ashen air. The taste is replaceable, I am not. Nailed to the cross, I spend your fruit. And look—every drop of…

Out of oblivion, birds the heron arranging its shawls, the tick of a blackbird, there, like a Chinese spoon, gulls in gutta-percha overshoes, and then the sound of the sea getting out of the bath. In the big bedroom, my friend's mother is dying in front of the children, wishing to spare them her struggle…

In the taxi alone, home from the airport, I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept creeping over the smooth plastic to find your strong meaty little hand and squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the noble ribbing of the corduroy, straight and regular as anything in nature, to find the slack…

It is evident not only in the general frame of Nature, that things most manifest unto sense have proved obscure unto the understanding. Sir Thomas Browne “Hi.” “Hi.” “You OK?” “I guess . . . You?” “I miss you.” “I miss you too.” “What are you doing?” “Reading . . . You?” “The Late Show.”…

Hazed with harvest dust and heat the air swam with flying husks as men whacked rice sheaves into bins and all across the sunstruck fields red flags hung from bamboo poles. Beyond the last treeline on the horizon beyond the coconut palms and eucalyptus out in the moon zone puckered by bombs the dead earth…

Three months after he lies dead, that long yellow narrow body, not like Christ but like one of his saints, the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are done in gilt, all knees and raw ribs, the ones who died of nettles, bile, the one who died roasted over a slow fire— three months…