Poetry

The ten-car Interstate collision has shucked me from the body. My little heat ascends toward space, and now, under the surgery theater lights, they are lifting out my usable parts to be reinstalled, to keep some stranger going awhile. Goodbye, old heart, old greased purple fist. Keep slugging, just one more inevitable rejection. So long,…

Koslowski belongs to that tiny group of people who came into being through immaculate conception. “Whether in my case too the Holy Spirit had a hand in it, or perhaps even God in Heaven, I just don't know,” Koslowski mentioned to friends. In any case when he was younger and slept with his natural mother…

In sunglasses like dark lakes I like the way the car capsules me from conversation, the smell of the day burning. I write home, “Wind through the door is in any house, land from a window a hard pie.” It was a good house. Shutters, soup. One day in the mailbox the face on the…

If I should purchase necktie, hat and cane, spats, and a natural shoulder double breast­ ed suit, and stroll downtown, would I attain to Class? My heart is sinking in the west. If birds above me, singing to enfilade me top to bottom with sweet tracer fire, lit up my brain's molecular arcade, would meaning…

One morning, as Koslowski awoke, an excellent sentence immediately occured to him which he would not be able to rid himself of until the noon hours. “It was so humid and oppressive, it felt as if the air was running a fever.” A sentence which just about any novelist would surely lust after. In the…

How can I believe      that once I lived      in the dark pool of my mother,      now ashes? Or that these      radiant beings my daughters.      now mothers, unfolded      from me? Or that      we all will at last      enfold in the body      of the earth? I play it      over and over but      like the atom for      the…

O microscopic, ice-capped summit of human eruptions, under the high intensity lamp your ink gleams diamond- like, as though a stone your size were precious individually, whereas we know only en masse is diamond dust useful, e.g. sprayed up onto midnight as constellations, animals, heroes, queens, utensils, about whom outsized stories got told because night…

The breakers had dredged a trough along the water's edge, shelved stones, the way they shelve sand and a wader, stepping down, stumbles and sinks to his waist. Each stone was rolled round, colored eggshell, ebony or brick, white as bleached clam or pink quartz ribboned green. She hefted their palm-sized weights as she lay…

This black hole is empty not just of eyes, voice, hands, but of the least stirring in the air. It is a cave so dark and still there is not the slightest flutter of even one bat's wing.