Poetry

  • The Iron Mosaic

    We counted the epochs with venerable names, with dry      thorns, with dry asphodel — Justinian, Mavrikios, the Androniki Kommini Paleologi, Mr. Manouil with his long worry beads made of thick      amber — “Renowned city” they called it; “the cloud-topped      stronghold of all that is Greek”; and the three reservoirs opposite the illustrious Sea of      Myrtoo…

  • A Novel of Jane Austen’s

    She turned into the drawing-room for privacy, but Henry and Eleanor had likewise retreated thither, and were at that moment deep in consultation about her. She drew back, trying to beg their pardon, but was, with gentle violence, forced to return . . . —Northanger Abbey When Henry and his sister Eleanor brought Miss Morland…

  • The Scarecrow

    Love is the hardest rock and the fragile, brine-drenched      ships, love is the other ship of rock, the untraveled, yet      thousand-times traveled ship on the highest seas — oh the chafing of patience — with love I fashioned death,      with love also my work; I went down — he said — to the town market,…

  • Kansas: before the war

    They are everywhere in the wild lights past the hammering of the dawn, the colors shooting off those sounds, and she can talk to them, she says, “communicate” in the same way distant cousins lean over corpses and say something appropriate but inaccurate. Stars cinder where the jungle ends, at the furthest outskirt of the…

  • Depressive

    No wonder it feels like a chore, by the hour, the ounce, the follicle, and no wonder we’d be more bored without our boring jobs than we are on the grayest Monday. It’s work, being depressed, and we’re tired, and we fall asleep and dream and wake like a skim of fat on a broth,…

  • A Marriage Poem

    1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs — inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is…

  • Mykonos. Wall With Mailbox

    The tacky dromedaries of the tachydromeion, Swaying in place, are yellow and are blue. They browse upon my postcards. The Aegean Gallops in all directions all around them. They are true Stoics. They can go nowhere. And they do. The light grows positively Sophoclean. Towerings and dishevelments ensue. A slash of zacharoplasteion neon Scribbles a…