Poetry

  • Hands in Winter

    When the locks froze I stuffed my hands with rags. My wife’s breasts or small animals work but I don’t use rocks; their edges make me dream fists. Wounds close – look at a chopped tree marry dirt, look at bird’s claws knarl on twigs. I like fingers supple as flames, something to lay on…

  • Catching Fire

    Everywhere gutter musicians with rare saxophones rise in the air like snowy egrets. The night wolf drifts on a coffin nailed with stars. A man in an alley unravels the feathers of a woman’s body. From the firmament above the rooftops a hand rockets loose, catching fire in the snow. The one window, steam-laced with…

  • The Only Go-Go Girl in Las Vegas

    (for Lynn Sukenick)      She is the      only      go-go girl      in Las Vegas with a      white BMW      with a      chartreuse mohair bathrobe      with      dayglo pasties and      monogrammed underwear      She is the only go-go      girl in Las Vegas      with      an emerald-green Ferrari      with tulips in her fishtank      Dunhill in her humidor      onions in her glove compartment      She…

  • St. Anthony at Fifteen

    What’s hard, sandy, and won’t crush like sweet olives against my lips? I lie on barbed wire but dream of caves plushed with skin. My mind’s lined with vaseline, my body cups like a breast against the sheet. Think of angels. Their marble knees streaked with veins, their thighs locked against the touch that spreads…

  • Next Year at This Time

    I am pregnant with my life. It will be red and immediate. It will have short fingers, very strong. Its eyes will grow later. To give birth to it at all I have to crack my skin, split up the spine, throw away my hair and my glazed mouth. Naked and the focus of lightning…

  • Lincoln Inward

    I      I think I’m lying. Surely one nation divided implies another sad device of history, when I might have said road into ourselves and seemed friendly. This country nags me like a bad excuse, these critical days away from myself demanding accounts, looking at the future in my wife’s sharp face. II      Rutledge, if I…

  • What I Want

    I want to be mentioned more. I want to be able to be dramatic: a sculptured Renaissance mouth fifteen feet high. I want all the pistol fingers. I want to drive up in a Bentley as big as a boat. I’d like somebody to see to this pretty quickly.

  • House

    You don’t sleep in the house that stands for happiness. You dance to the music of its cracks, flexing your lonely muscles like a priest, pretending your body is a ghost come to haunty yourself. The closets, with luck, remember you as moths or shelves & kiss your open mouth with years that taste like…