Poetry

                                                  how much of the hand is fist my father asks—                                                        for him it’s halfwhat you’d expect—the tape’s temper                  between splint and split knuckles:symbol’s useless rigor;                                             the long ride home—                                                  for the boy with the torn lip,it’s half what you’d expect                                       bleaching blood off someripped…

maybe it’s too early for glow, slow asa cloud slung like what a soldier might carryhome—I’ll never understand whymy mother, for example, carrieda set of latrine tools, mosquito netting,a cat that wouldn’t leave her sideher infidelities, she carried thosetoo, like volcanic stonesthat which impossibly formed insidethe open mouth of mountains of whatone might choose to…

The orchard rippling in torrential windand apples themselves bob or drop, a swiftlapsarian plunge. Meal and moldering—in every core, trace cyanide and seed. Again, again, against the wind, my hatlike such small boat with sail taught, tugging.A lowtide mind, a rough dumb slosh-round bone.The satisfaction to be gained in weightof wanting, measured out by peck…

Would’ve said, did you see the calvesall copper and gold, cold leaning intotheir hulking mothers? Would’ve said, I grew up warm ina house with the wrong kind of bounty,sulking all over myself. Would’ve said room temperature affectionis the gelded way I try to keep youfrom disappointment. Trouble is I get myselfin trouble postcarding what should…

“We drank no milk for months, maybe a year,”my mother told me, “they poureda famine’s worth down the drains;all talk that summerwas of nuclear cloudsand acid rain.” Then came the crumbling of the Wall,and my father’s tears—my childish vision of himas the last communist,bathed in the blueglare of defeat, the revolution having been televisedand discardedas…

          Maybe what a river loves mostabout the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it—is their willingness or resignation to being          mere context for the river’s progressor retreat, depending. And maybe how the cattailsand reeds flourish there means they prefer          a river-love—how the river, running always away the way rivers tend to, stands as proof that reliabilitydoesn’t…

It’s like a habit with you—your idea of tenderness—leading the blameless a littlemore blame-ward just soyou yourself can feel a bitless lonely: in what world is that tenderness? Andthough I disagreed with him,I made no argument,because really why were wetalking about any of this or,to be honest, even talking at all? But it was that…

Late autumn in the orange-bronze rangesAnd the sky still wet with slaughter, the voteDone, dying goldenrod tuning the meadowsBeige under flocks of birds that flex the airInto one black v after another,Carrying with them the occasionalSilence that flight coaxes from the chest, throat,And mind, coaxes from altitude’s blue viewTo me, though the bright air, no…

Book I Of a first disobedience, and the fruitOf that tree, whose mortal taste brought deathInto the world, and all our woe. Sing Muse,How heaven and earth rose out of chaos;Aid my adventurous song that intendsTo soar while it pursues things attemptedIn prose and rhyme. Instruct me from the firstPresent with wings outspread, dovelike, vast….