Poetry

A Day Without Poetry

Not a line, not a glimpse, not a second. Every eye no more inhabited than a fish. The fat on the old woman’s arm hangs like a white sloth from the limb of a tree as she airs her dentures in a tenement yawn. Eyeless, we raise our hands in greeting and touch against the…

Poem

Our eyes unlash slowly one by one at last bald lids rise What for Mimicry re the poet’s eye looking inwards sees without the lashes’ soft-pleaded intercedence too pupilly cool cruel as muttered justice I call my goodbyes home in the dusk

May Day, My Thirty-third

Coffee keeps me dancing. My father drinks coffee all day, so do I— two of us troubling our hearts with a hundred miles between us. He’s a clerk in a hardware store: paint and machinery all day, TV and historical novels all night as suburban stars fall. May brings reruns, a cold, new appetites. My…

Where

1 Like a transparent tooth In a myth’s mouth I sang of words in words That had no foretell 2 I was the closest relative To the one who never existed That absent autumn drops Its cease-colored nets on oh 3 Ever-so-longing I lay Spanking my placenta plate In curtseyland I’ll stand now Groundswell gate…

Marichi

An hour before sunrise, The moon low in the East, Soon it will pass the sun. The Morning Star hangs like a Lamp, beside the crescent, Above the greying horizon. The air warm, perfumed, An unseasonably warm, Rainy Autumn, nevertheless The leaves turn color, contour By contour down the mountains. I watch the wavering, Coiling…

Song

Perched on each others tongues To fly Where now are the angels In what pursuit plunged vaporously Who late will sniff your crotch for eternity The wind is rising The diamond that divides the faces of a wound The surface of our planet should be waxed To make the wind go faster Than the windmills…

A Poem to Go Before Eight Lines by Jalal-ud-din-Rumi

Leaving here, I slip out the gates of the palace garden      as autumn stuns the trees with remembrance                        and makes them come around again                                          like a memory of dervish flutes. In my mind I hear the word perfect.                  My feet touch down into cool…