Poetry

     (—for Gary Wilson & in memorium:            Kenneth Wilson, 1943-1977) The brutal shift: one minute present—then a week on the delicate liferaft of coma—and the next: past. You honestly begged for him a few more diamonds of breath, until the last luminant exhalation exhaled. Your brother gone and the long O sounds of your own…

i’m still thin and high on having the biopsy negative tho i don’t know where to go after the artists place in the trees The husband who will leave and leave until he can’t come home is back after the first time pleading lyn his nagging is a sticky lullaby i almost don’t hear thru…

We have learned a Mandarin language, an ingrown puzzle binding us to talk to one another— the many ones and others—to disengage with unfixing clarity our actual selves as figures from their grounds, the sheets of glass or broad leaves that hold rain like beads of sweat on a high arched, double arched, romanesque brow…

Killing anything was pure accident. A dumb stalker, a worse shot—I went almost daily, to the woods. A favorite prey was slow and shallow: a brook. I’d say, as it moved languidly: Don’t move, you rascal! And when it did, of course, as it does, I’d shoot. I liked that: no wound, or at least…

First, let us move away,      but leave behind us The grand piano, the Steuben glass, books and Phonograph records, what might distract us, And since this is a real journey—surrounded By stars and their shadows and what is beyond Them—we will not travel. We sit all day and night and watch the moths Eat our…

A year before I found what was new: a stream sizzled over stones, August heat rattled the ocean’s brittle edge like a loose pane, a field where weeds like needles poked the wool of thick air. Usually eyes say no to thorns and stick to roses. Today even you saw that ponds brim with sky…

An especially forlorn specimen Answers a marriage ad On a street of compulsory misfortune One drizzly November afternoon Sorrow with its sidekicks and damsels In a diningroom with a pianola which the subway      rattles from time to time A cup of tea with her eyelash floating in it Cakes the size and color of a…

Little lady of the Welcome Wagon in the suburb I now call home, I waited eight months to hear your voice chirping across my telephone, and when you came, and when you came, I heard your wings flap you away before I could reach my door to see what love sent you here, and why….

1 april: that point from which the temperate world ripens and suspends and leaves itself behind. a man hangs by one hand from the slender branch of his life. even his children he has cautioned away from that tree: the early apple, not long before blossom, the one the bluejays always get the fruit of….