Poetry

In bed I’m a mad Hungarian. Propped on pillows, a cup of hot black tea on the night table. I hear a strain of bitter chords a gypsy cart halting. If I could go back that far would I find a small face similar to mine? The crust surrounding a pit of ghetto and merchants…

Packing up, a new swing around a lamp post and down the gummy street each step has a trash can has a wall with a window with curtains has a railing and a pair of legs rising from high heels up and up on through her shoulders up above the rooftops. Night lit like a…

                       You stand waiting. You listen.                        At your back the house is still,            between the tickings of clocks and timbers.                  Beneath the rough soles of your feet you can feel the cellar stretching to its foundations —            silence in the stone, the furnace brooding.            …

You chose me for widow not for wife transferring your pain on schedule I turned darker you turned paler on schedule. You chose me for elegy. This spring the confused migrations collide with the smokeless chimney. I air myself out with the mildewed wardrobe you left hung like an armory. Oh you’ve done it, you’ve…

Through the soft pulp of farmed pine, the saw moves with the incessant logic of progress. Why stand up when you can fall down? Why be a tree when you can be a house? Here there is nothing to hope for but branches. As the saw works, it whispers of soft flanks weathering in lumberyards….

I would like to take it all back, this suit doesn’t belong to me. I’m the undercover man, an agent transferred to a far district. What I fear is a murmur from across the fields, the giant leech that just slid over the porch railing. If I listen to the singer — it’s a state…

This one does its work by returning over and over to the place where it began until even memory bears no splinters. Flatness, flatness, the plane dreams as it sweeps down every plank envisioning unsown fields, boxcars, Unitarian churches. “Lie down,” sings the plane. “Lie down and be the same as all the rest.”

for my aunt The water is dark and cold and I can hold it. I drink from my hands. You are out of my reach, your eyes closed holding only a thin blue light. Moss darkens my window, covering the sky like hair. Here, we can’t see the moon. It views you from the head…

At the table she used to sew at, he uses his brass desk scissors to cut up his shirt.                             Not that the shirt was that far gone: one ragged cuff, one elbow through;                               but here he is, cutting away the collar she long since turned.                                  What gets to him finally, using his…