Poetry

for Brian Higgins, d. 2015 However slivered, however occluded, however brindled the lightyou shined in your walks from building to building all these years,on sidewalks forking the city, or across the violet harbor of the suburbs;however vertigo’d my own vantage point—or myopic my abilityto see a lighthouse light its way through mist: I know that…

At 2 a.m., the dog nosed up a robin on the pavement beside my car. Itwas less than a fledgling, and the nest was high above us in a parkinglot paper birch, its fist of twigs and threaded trash plain in the Augustlamplight. It wasn’t clear whether the bird had fallen or been nudgedout by…

I have been dying under these Connecticut stars all my life, relentlessly,even though the sky is different above Buenos Aires and Lusaka, eventhough the Magellanic Clouds float like blossoms of dust and couldbe seen for the price of a plane ticket. In fairness, I have Sirius andVega and Aldebaran. In fact, most of the brightest…

The anniversary of some future sadness passes every day unnoticed.The calendars bear no trace of it; the candles stay in their box. Inevery house, there’s a dead mouse in the wall that the living micebuild their nest beside. Meanwhile, it’s the usual programs aimed atthe sagging couch.  

The time will come—meanwhile you’ll add more ashes,that dirt in your hand. Goodbye, goodbye,you’ll learn to say it. What you want isdirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave.Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street,turning a corner before I can seethat red plaid shirt, torn sleeve. Tender 26,bad number, risky year…

Did I know him? Yes his speed(did I tell on him, turn him in?)fell out of his pocket climbing upmy two-story steps—hmmm,what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny,condiment no wonder he talkedso fast, eyes switching back & forth,if I sat at his feet with some slownarrative. He was a chef—an excuse. Did I go to the porn…

Could you love God in a world without death? Teacher asked. And we children shouted, a bristling forest of raised yearning arms.Yes! No! Depends! We didn’t know the answer, or even the question, just wanted to beadmired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of ustook the opportunity to punch our neighbors, or, in our…

There’s a radio station at the left end of the dialwhere you can listen to 24 hours of genocide and war crimes;how in the south the election was bought cheap by men in unmarked uniforms;how the contaminated medicine was shipped abroaduntil babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then the big conspiracies: how the…

“There is a high risk of losses of lambs and sheep exposed to these conditions.”—Bureau of Meteorology, Western Australia “Cold pastoral!”—Keats I have done two drawings: one of sheepwith lambs on a hillside near the old colonialmansion between here and town, and anotherof sheep dying with their dying lambson the same hillside in bad weather….