Poetry

Boneyard

These people in the future won't be like us. Oh no, they'll be kinder and their foreheads will bulge past their noses with wisdom. They'll have our pictures of course, although they won't be snapshots as we know them but little holographs, three-dimensional photos, so when one takes one from his pocket it will look…

Night

I want to say night is a flaming tuba but that is not right. In flame and tuba we do not see deer migrating through the pine forest or the full moon sitting in a fat chair reading your latest book of poems. We do not see the accidental death of two teenagers on the…

Possessions

Like jewelry his bicycle gleams on my porch, attached to his hands, carried a flight before he even knocks and it wheels its majesty into my kitchen. As we talk of the torch I flick my lighter. Later we fly to the park. He wheels away down streets and sometimes closer, asking how far, how…

blue wing

blue wing      I found you a monarch flown from his route along the meridian into my tarred driveway where is your mate who was always with you and is not used to solitary travel I took you for an heir of blueness a passenger of seasons I took you for orchid the pupa wakes to…

Saint Francis

In her studio an artist begins to paint a portrait of Saint Francis in his beast-colored robe. He is bending slightly forward preaching to the birds. With short vertical strokes she paints the birds white, the mountains blue. She outlines the features of his face, thin lips, high cheekbones, a golden halo. She paints the…

Ripe

Before supper, my father's wife shouts my brother out. He has come too close, touched her like a son, she said, like a son. I don't want any more sons. And my father, ignoring this too, glad he is on the Florida coast now, goes out into late fall's twilight to pick his grapefruit, ripe…

To the Muse

So what if your name is “Burning Bush”— hair like fire, that bright, that red. And fingers delicate as birthday candles. So what if you look a little eerie, so pale and thin astride that bony nag.      Still you are the luminous madonna — both lodestar and throat-lump in one.            Without you, my voice…

Then

Everyone wore evening clothes, Got in and out of supercharged saloons The size of drawing rooms, And lived in a nightclub To the tune of watery. Latin rhythms I could pick up on my crystal set. Radio antennas also emitted Cute little bolts of lightning That flew through the air bearing The message: Balloonists Found,…

Rough Air

A mile into the sky our plane is practically nothing. This turbulence of air—also nothing, like the loose cells that float within the eye. Connecticut rolls and pitches below— Einstein was right, mistrusting his own feet, and so was Bishop Berkeley, for a plane glinting unseen among leaden clouds, droning toward the Atlantic unheard, is…