Poetry

  • The Silver Coin

    The cows once believed that if you stand in a pond shaped like a circle during the full moon you'll die. That was everyone's first summer and it finally got so hot the animals decided to hire another cow to go in the water. Just to be sure. This was a cow nobody cared much…

  • Snowfall

    This could be any city, the poor parts, poverty both camouflaged and signaled by unplowed snow. The morning paper still lies on the doorstep, touched only by the cold gloves of a boy who moves in his own world from house to house, past a silhouette pulling a sweater on, to a woman who answers…

  • Home

    My heart and my bones wince. It's so damn sad-looking and ugly, The Bronx— Driving past those small hills Blighted for miles with brick Desert-similar apartment buildings: The landscape I come from. It's so damn ugly in its torment Of knifings and fires, I forget I was happy there, sometimes, In its damp and dingy…

  • Palm Sunday

    (Letter to Gary in St. Paul) Silenter, emptier, never. The sky's overcast, your weather's now mine. I am troubled in a hundred places— And contradicted, contradicted— By the dull light.      Polyphonic weather, Eminentest mood-tinker, sensitivest Most biological face of the physical Globe, least durable, least endurable: Accelerate my ascent and erosion, Erode my nascent ascents,…

  • Gardenia

    The night my sister wiggled into her black sheath and shielded her first corsage, I took a deep breath and learned about love: how sweet the flower, how the delicate blossom would bruise. I don't remember the boy's name, if my sister had a good time, only a new kind of sadness that was all…

  • Letter

    The words I try to write to you, pressing The pen against your silence, against your silence Fail. I should send you The blank pages, with their blue lines So near the surface (the places You let me kiss you, inside the elbow, The back of the knee. . .), or I should lie to…

  • Easter Sunday

    (Letter to Clyde Rykken) Empty church, perplexingly uplifting Morning. I swept the sanctuary twice; Palm-spears, and the corn-silk nerve-threads palms spawn, Eluded my diligentest brooming. The sacristy will smell like a hay-loft 'til the end of Pentecost. The parish (Shame! I resist the pun, 'pon my sexton's Whisky oath. Shilling for the new grave! Ah,…

  • Stuffed Rabbit

    It's last call when a man you've met asks if you'd like a black russian. All night, he's talked sports and half- listened to you. Still—he has a lean body and luxurious beard and you like lean bodies and luxurious beards. So you nod and take little sips of vodka and kahlua. Sandwiched in a…

  • Denial

    We are not there now, we are never Driving into the fog (in love but, having decided This is wrong, not touching) On our way to Stinson beach. Taking the hard way, anyway, There were road signs, CONSTRUCTION AHEAD DETOUR, into a mist that became Progressively heavier until, at last, It was almost—caught in your…