Poetry

You are sad. You are leaning down on your sadness like the rain is trying to do to us but we are in the house. You are watching the water fall so easily from the tap, you are whizzing through the dishes, you are a man sweating in the next room in a few minutes…

Frontiers are explored in a mirror; sharks contained in their appetite. The skin occludes all but the pen, harvesting love from any field. The clock is a compass leading to the corridors of sleep. The borders that will be crossed occur as we sit alone in our rooms. An island is waiting with the promise…

I am writing my heart out here. In a kitchen, two towns away, my friend Fanny is doing likewise. She sits surrounded by her children like a patient plant. When we telephone each other the children come into our ears like static; stereo commotion: they cling to us like clay. When we sit down to…

My first substituted coughing for breathing. It had no nose no eyes just a smooth feverish body: incurable tenderness. My second did have a nose brown eyes and soft full gums. She looked like my uncle the one I’d only seen pictures of — the one I knew I’d have loved the best. This baby…

1. Always I feel it bloating like a tumor a weight, a shape brushing my thighs as I wade into sleep. The water is warm like my blood flat as a kitchen table my face dances there in sun circles the water is a caress. Then a fin breaks the surface coming fast. 2. You…

The Holston lolls like a tongue here, its banks Gummy and ill at ease; across the state line, Moccasin Gap declines in a leafy sneer. Darkness, the old voyeur, moistens his chapped lips. Unnoticed by you, of course, your mind Elsewhere and groping: the stuck clasp, her knees, The circle around the moon, O anything….

Sometimes I have to think big, bigger than an airplane hanger, bigger than Lake Erie, bigger than nitroglycerin. When I think that big, I stand in a field and look down for a long time, my crackerbox boots are clumsy continents, I ignore them and look instead at a stone. It is cold, grey and…

I The morning train arrives at two. Be there. I’ll be carrying a briefcase, wearing heavy face lotion. If you get there before I do I’ll be in the second coach, compartment 5. I’ll be sitting in seat 3 facing a fat man. He’s following me. After the briefcase. Discretion. If I don’t descend the…

( – The Horse Latitudes are a region of unusual calm, lying in the North Atlantic Ocean. When sailing ships were becalmed there, the crew used to throw overboard cargo and horses. Thus lightened, the boat could take advantage of whatever wind there might be.) What does the sea want, my clothes, my keys, my…