Poetry

  • The Old Math

    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…

  • Wall Mice

    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…

  • Imagining the River

    “…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…

  • I did not know any secrets then

    but I knew there were secrets. We all knew  and we all strong-armed the chesty life vests back into their shed like lovers  backed into closets.                                          Only at that lake did I play spies; only there did I try  writing with my sinister hand:  Tin of poison in nightstand.  But it was just decorum  putting those deadly caroms in drawers where no one…

  • Deracinations: Seven Sonigrams

    1.           STORY Shhhh! her mother said. Sit down.Next to me. Time to read. The girl climbed up on the couch,crossed her ankles. Pay attention. A yellow picture book. Notice that the word “monkey” sounds like “Monica.” The title character.George, lived in Africa, a continent that on her globe was colored red.The leaves on the skinny…

  • On Dizziness

    A violent stirring of the interiorunfolding by churns. What we begin with is disequilibrium.The slurred echoing of the eye. Call it misrecognition:thinking it’s the earth that’s blurrywhen it’s the mind. – Lost are the coordinatesof the spirit, or the animalintuition that binds— What I mistook for a border was but a moving pointwhich makes me limitless,somehow…