Poetry

I don’t often revisit the year I fosteredall the neighborhood strays, teenagers enticed by decay and overrunwith the lesions that wistfulness deals. I don’t often revisit the year my parentsdisappeared, but whose house we filled with smoke so indissolubleit consoled like blindness— the year pedestrians crossed the streetto avoid my yard, alive with ragwort and…

reading on the couch, your messy hairfinally beginning to gray. You arebreathing, moving moleculesof air aside, inhabitingspace that could go emptyso easily. You holda heating pad to your sidewhere I bruised your rib, clumsyin my hunger for your infinitevariety. ya’aburnee,lovers say in Arabic—you bury me.It’s quiet enoughthat I can hear the ringing alwaysin the background…

You know how lightning never lasts long enoughto get a good look at it? and your eyes do this thing,as if they could grow larger, widen out of your facetrying to see enough,longer, more— this happens also when the heron passes: too quickly.Today I lucked into seeing how richly blueare the tops of his wing-feathers….

What I got of worldly gumption I learned in the church of false assumption. Under the sentence of wrath and fire I studied the windows, the girls in the choir.

A small room, a small porch, a large window, a stove, a table, a chair, a cot, a few books, a few thoughts, a notebook, a pencil, an eraser…

Gary Snyder is a man of the West and of the Far East, which is farther west. Or say you go to the east, and then you’ll come first to the East, but then to the West, which is Europe the seat of Western Civilization. American historians know that Kentucky once was the West and…

Reach your cup into the air and draw it back full of water.

Them that’s got got to lose. Them that ain’t got, can’t.  

At the bar in Otto’s near 5th,both off from work, the heavyfoot traffic of silhouetted commutershastening home outside, and us, heretwo drinks in. The conversationhas just ramped up and he wantsto know why I did it, how I could have betrayedour family. The bartender is in night school, we learn, for law but, meanwhile, he…