Poetry

For Christian You know it hadn’t a drop to do with loveexcept that if I showed you howsalt boiled on each winding stairback into that Baudelaireancellar eaved in velvet,your ear might love mine more for it. Surely I’d gone partly madbut can it have been madness if it yieldeda sound like a fruit spasming its…

From Look at This Blue Your palms know where to go.                                                  What they imagine leads you.Everything we muster moves us along, like water mirroring itself remembers                                                  where to flow, how to go there.In the dream you follow, in the dream we fly over all of this direness     float. We move like porpoises, undulate in air,…

six meters away from a charnel bikeyou lie with closed lids beneath maw of atmosphere, blessing a forest of gravel, helmet on and face up.three of the rubberneckers on 999 calls, and by your brown body, the towersof people living out a dreamers’ ending of others’ displacement, where smoke would hittheir new build windows that…

Growing up in the South is like kicking a mule          to feel eternity in your bones.                    Or kicking a scarecrow, and calling it a mule.Or running your fingers over the rusted,          abandoned blade from a tractor                    in its eternal rest, and calling that a mule. You’ll call anything a mule. Lace doilies          on the dining room table, the white-suited mayor                    leaning…

we call them, that week          at our rented beach shack,with smiles equally, let’s admit,           tender and cruel.Heart, cancer, rope—          they flourished without them. Designed tiny houses.          Protested often.A month in Guatemala.            Book clubs,movie groups, wine tasting          before the play. More friends than either of us, solitary couple,          could imagine.Some old myth unfurling,           surely, before usas we haul their bright umbrellas          down…

In the piles in the backyardhe and I sat in June’s pumped-up sun, half-blinded,sifting through rocks and crystals, winter’s lump and strandsprouting thin green leaves, lobes that would turnto vine and squash and yellow in fall’s sideways light.He grabbed fistfuls with clumsy fingers, smearing themon his mouth, wanting to be in it completely. Later, he’d…

who drownedin my two fingers, denied the bittersweetness of a black- berry and nearlysurrendered to the meat of a melon, but considered,mostly, the craft of thirst or deathand tongued itself goodbye. oh, gentleness.oh, small brown float of a life. what newsshould I give your beloveds? most of them havingfollowed the rinds, which too,though I often…

Come see our siding glimmer in the sun.Our knuckles stung in bleach. All cobwebs gone.Come see our daffodils like little gods,these yellow resurrections born to nodagain in April breeze. Our vase-staged roomsare dustless as a baron’s desk. We groomedthem free of poetry (my books in binsteeter attic stacks) and snapshots of our kidsthe realtor said…

During the last days when we were waiting for herto stop being her, it felt like a holiday, a thrill in the air—rarely-seen relatives and friends coming to visit, everyone taking turns lying beside her, smelling her hair, tellingher she did everything right, was a good person and mother.When the first, faint rattle formed in…