Poetry

I don’t dive for pearls and I don’t expect anyone else to dive for pearls either

You swat a bug off a ham shank. Meats hang in the attic like a row of stairs to another floor. You are up here to get a chair so you can sit outside if you want. The pixy little butterfly pins your daughter makes, are in rows in a box. Three were sold already…

The Great Dance,            the Yu step “performed the Great Bear”                              or did      those stars, into the midst of us,                  feeling us out to know the power. Exousia. Feeling the ground out step by step      to know what sort of earth our senses made us                        (casting…

The pears fall hushed in the grass like fat pigeons. At first spotted careful as goldfish, a delicate bruise soon swallows their contours. On the boughs pears clench into yellow. (We ate slightly rotted pears as children, our tongues finding the sharp line between use & decay. Sometimes against the core, a worm like green…

I You have been dreaming for a long time of being me And it has made you so tired that sleep seems impossible so Suddenly you remain where you have been for a long time II During times in your life like this which were meant to be emblems For you to admire in the…

I’ll sit on this porch all night, my gin glass sweating, moths searing their eyes in the attractive light. I might be beautiful, I’ll need to be patient as the man on the train, who waves, who requires so much of me in passing. And the tracks receding, go gentian, violet, toward themselves; curative as…

It was not spring but spring seemed on its way That winter’s day that sun and wine had warmed For us, at leisure (one might almost say At peace), although the city’s sidewalks swarmed With people not too different from our own. But whether it was splendour or a slum Through which we walked, we…

I The noon dazes us, a brilliant back-beater. II Like hands slapping the water, ducks settle. III Shakedown time: fall trees fork over to the winds. IV Cornfields craze the wild crows, raucous on the fence. V This, this, this: like a stick against fence pickets.

Two straight days of sun and the idiot magnolia opens Boston, to cleanse it, pull the bullet of winter. I feel better. The bodies in the river thaw to neon fish, and clouds, sculling. There’s no telling when it will snow again. Blossoms are words in the long-winded streets: landed absences, long-distance calls for relief….