Poetry

He weeds the clouds

Dad screwed another cigarette into his lips crossed his legs folded his workman’s arms along his weed-stained lap (you can’t speak now not to him he isn’t here just watch watch him climb over the shed the chubby lawn home. watch my daddy smoke fantasy.)

The Arsonist

By the end of this story, the house next door should be in flames, but that may never happen. In his dream, there is no house. Instead, he has stolen the blueprints. He ignites them with a handful of matches. And now the dream has already changed. It has nothing to do with fire. He…

the rabbits

it didn’t take long for papa to find his place. he sat down on the coffee table and pulled out his matches. the first one lit easily so he put it on the floor between his feet and the flame sandwich ate him up. mama came in screaming and running about like my rabbits in…

The Earth Swept Clean

The earth swept clean of creatures not its own: earth, ocean, air, to you do we belong only? No! The long climb up from slime turning on a dime      remains, hanging on by a thread to the dead generations, lowly, encapsulated though once I read in TIME, that wisdom of the week we twitchy moderns…

Beating a Fast Tattoo

“. . . it is not War which is tearing up the world, it is Conscience . . .”      —in The Fixer “The honors of this world, what are they but puff, and emptiness, and peril of falling?”      —St. Augustine `How does it feel when you fall?‘ Asked plainly enough at the dinner table Mother…

Soon

I hear typing so I go over to see what my wife is writing. There is something like a museum about her tonight, a feeling of great space and flames that burn unseen, inside houses in the nineteenth century. I suppose she can hear hooves go past, outside. I suppose that she can sit by…

Baseball

The game of baseball is not a metaphor and I know it’s not really life. The chalky green diamond, the lovely dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes multiplying around the cities are only neat playing fields. Their structure is not the frame of history carved out of forest, that is not what I see…