Poetry

When I gave up praying,an $800 windfall arrived in the mailand no longer did I brew my tearsinto a bitter tea that paid the bills. Though it turned out to be surplus in theescrow account, once I’d have chalked it upto God—that unexpected checka biscuit for the trick I’d been taught. But what, if not…

The whale was real.                                        So was the beach, carsick                                        & damp in the armpits as I was.Father’s shaggy hunk                                        of leg against my young flank.The crowd on the shoulder                                        of the road watching the crowd                                        smoke around the whaleI mistook for a stranded barrel.                                        Did it outswell the ocean                                        with breathing, was it yearling                                        white, bruised like light                                        entering a dark room, in its…

This condition is not like hoarding for winter.                    There may be no torpor here,                                                                       no feast, either. I see a fox, petrified in bog water.                    I envy the gall wasp, its egg                                                               a pincushion on the oak leaf. This disruption will likely stay                                                        unnamed. I call it                    faceful of dove. I call it                    glass-choked gladiola. I know                    too little of life. I forget…

Please don’t ever ask me to do it—to run throughthe plot points A, B, C, and D, as Peter Brooksdiscusses in his famous book of the same name.My mind is allergic to chronology. Do you feelthe unquenchable thirst for plot that Brooks describes?OK, then, here’s a plot for you: last night, I sawtwo guys in…

On the television the boy is watching Charlotte’s Web & it is near the beginningwhere the whole family is sitting down to eat & we are made to see the farmer’sbreakfast—a stack of pancakes, golden brown & towering—& the boy becomes caught in this moment. He will watch the movie it feels like hundreds of…

Why not let my daughters tossrocks over the shed while birds bickerand dart through my wraparound mood? The girls remindme that wonderful means “full of wonder,”and that no tech company will ever simulatewhat’s happening in my nerves right now—the swig from a flask tucked in my shirt,the kid-squeals and birds obsessed with winter.Only an asshole…

Ending on a line by Jack Gilbert Want is still the centerof all living shapes,my daughter included. She’s gnawed off her deadends and scratched her throatinto a ragged line graph. It doesn’t work to tell herfive plus five, if you use both hands,can be a butterfly. Textbook splayed, she contemplatesthe application of integrals tothe area…

There are two piles of documents: the one on the righthas to become the one on the left.There is a paperweight in the shape of a whale. Some pages have almost nothing on them, maybeeight words floating in eggshell space.They have to be read too, so I do, I drift over them. Once I used…

“…they camped at eventide by the River of Forgetfulness, whose waters no vessel can contain…and each one as he drank forgot all things.”– Plato, Republic Imagine you are weary. Imagine                    you have carried the heftof skeletons for years. Imagine the day you fear death less than living long. Imaginearriving at the blue ribbon of river& across…