Poetry

All winter, I sent letters to old friends turned strangers, ghosts, representations of other eras, statues & facades. I spoke of sobriety & struggle. I spoke of fatherhood & a new masculine energy tended in the intimacy of a circle of other initiated men. Who am I trying to impress? My teenage son calls everybody…

Or try to Knowing someday everyone I love will die I’m practicing                               Not for death but To love the labor of my human life           Who can Treasure the broken bone and dish The house in flame or flood and What it takes to fix           I take instead Notes from smaller sufferings Once waking in a…

Again, you are the church of what separates wrestling and professional wrestling. A little money, a lot of folding chairs. What separates knowing how to speak a language and knowing how to play an instrument is smaller than the difference between the blood on my shirt being mine or someone else’s. The French are allowed…

Watching it move up the valley in its plentitude between the mountains and me, the rain soaking into each particle of soil, glistening on the tip of each leaf, like the old myth of a god who sees our every thought and deed— impossible, but why not, if rain can do this? Rain: one thing…

A memorial erected over a void. Usually for a living person who just vanished, but whose death seems indisputable. Begin with a shovel, an empty rectangular cake of earth. Begin with a word, a grail to extinguish all hope. Begin with the story of a child disappearing between his fifth-grade class and the bus stop—baseball…

“Being Property Once Myself. I have a feeling for it …”—Lucille Clifton

I never saw my mother hold her husband’s hand           or stroke his blue-blazered shoulder. Compliments were reserved for thin women and           handsome priests. London and her last two houses brought brightness to her eyes.           Her greatest affection she saved for a succession of Scotties, a breed known to be aloof.           Each one she fed into…

There is nowhere for the wind to blow through the grass the way it blows through words to make them prayer. Not here. Not after harvest, just stems left, and seed pods, and leaves. All of it a wick as wide as there is landscape. Some farmers burn their fields, and the fire is a…

rockets and rocks, dingbats, all-nite coffee and gas-ups, flying saucers and neon Welcome to Los Vegas, starbursts and steel beams, bold upsweeps: a future. She wants to be atomic and glass, Hollywood and Jetsons, wants a future beyond this past constantly hardening in her path. Every time she makes someone stone, they monument, outlast her—…