Poetry

  • The Halt

    The bricks pale, two by two, behind the fire Laid across dread-hot dragontails. One ear cocked for a free lance, you’re stalled Above — or no, below — tonight’s pyre Of loveknots quite untied in style. Whose scales Measure me? you ask. For that matter, inspire? Or so you’d write, set straight, complain To me…

  • Eating Carp

    Selfless deeds have a way of repaying their doer. for instance, the man, a simple business traveler who rescues a pitiful horse from a mud hole, covers him with his cloak, doesn’t return in the next life as a pony stuck like a bewildered musician in a swamp eyeing people going by with eyes brimming…

  • A Small Cave

    Something is cooking with no containing wall something vague to the point of being a lesion peering blindingly from a wall in which it is weightless, without size, in need of a caustic restless shoulder that seems to be rowing, translating one-way forever deeper Perched there, Bernifal rides back and forth warbling at times into…

  • Villanelle

    The building needs a few repairs — though some rooms are still comfortable and warm. Where is the landlord? No landlord’s there. A fire burned up the back stairs; we thought it was a false alarm. The building needs a few repairs. We thought “love” was a house of air: my hand got caught; you…

  • There Is Only One

    Nothing is and nothing in itself is a mountain. I know nothing except certain brief anecdotes: The wall has bricks. The Navy has cigarettes. The wide world is an old horizon. The chair is flat and without boundaries. There is no reason to call it a chair. But we do, and you know it is…

  • The Death of Bill Evans

    Three inch caramel-colored field slug on its back, vibrating by the scraps of a big Amanita Muscaria It has eaten more than its size and now its true size in visionary trance makes me sad of my size — I can never eat enough of a higher order to trick the interior leper to the…

  • To The Skaters

    Bound in my car, parallelograms of light shifting in front of me, red      & white, darkness coming on like a sock, the ankle of the day — I notice two skaters out on the perilous river where the ice wrinkles like agony on a face in shock —                  (daring, or indifferent? Their hockey…

  • Of The Great House

         In a dream to wander to some place where may be heard the complaints of all the miserable on earth.                              Hawthorne, The American Notebooks 1.                                    To the Poets Let let let let be                        to the poets                                          praise,…

  • Little Tricks of Linear B

               The beginning was the dream,            and the voice was a turban gourd.            A strum.            What are we hiding?            Our new bodies            born underground with pearls of old corn?            Our dry husks            on the winter-hard ground/ where            is the moment            between wet rotting            and ashy…