Poetry

You Can Thank

If you sneeze into a towel you can thank the fluffed cotton for not being steel you can thank the cotton boll for not thinking how to grow but growing anyhow through hard flatpacked deep south dirt in one slow-motion explosion from seed not out but up up in a stiff upward thrust you can…

The Life-Giving

With nothing but God’s word to go on, I built a boat too big to move, that never would float unless the sea came climbing the hills to take it. And even before the clouds had fully swollen, I loaded my live, paired cargo and waited for the expanding seas to find me. For nearly…

Tarzan of the Sestina

Dear Tarzan:      I have often wondered how you like being Tarzan instead of the regular Joe. Do you really enjoy swinging on vines and all that? It must be great to be a hero and have fans all over the world, and kids imitating the way            you talk, and of course you have a…

The Priest

Sacrificing to the four quarters I find the winds responsive. The rains come and I wish them here. I walk without shoes in the rain. Once from a bush a voice spoke to me— from the old brown skull of a murdered man: he told me his life story. Hearing, I knew it once more….

Beasts Belong To Themselves

for my friend Sweeney Post, American Legion Hall, was cold with dead spots in the boards. We practiced with herniated basketballs and rural cheerleaders. In Brooklyn, you finally screwed your Jewish Princess, mourning for her father. We lost      an infant. A big Irish nurse ate her one morning in the sunroom before the ward grew…

The Skywriter

I Five miles up, winds unravel to their different colors. The pilot gazes at the lost land. Velvet cows plod between seams of a checkerboard, green and yellow squares. The land reduces to a puzzle of primary colors. If anyone looked up they would see his plane disappear, just as he watches them melt like…