Poetry

for Brian Higgins, d. 2015 However slivered, however occluded, however brindled the light you 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 ability to see a lighthouse light its way through…

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

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

The anniversary of some future sadness passes every day unnoticed. The calendars bear no trace of it; the candles stay in their box. In every house, there’s a dead mouse in the wall that the living mice build their nest beside. Meanwhile, it’s the usual programs aimed at the 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 is dirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave. Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street, turning a corner before I can see that red plaid shirt, torn…

Did I know him? Yes his speed (did I tell on him, turn him in?) fell out of his pocket climbing up my two-story steps—hmmm, what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny, condiment no wonder he talked so fast, eyes switching back & forth, if I sat at his feet with some slow narrative. He was a…

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 be admired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of us took the opportunity to punch our neighbors,…

There’s a radio station at the left end of the dial where 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 abroad until babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then 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 sheep with lambs on a hillside near the old colonial mansion between here and town, and another of sheep dying with their dying lambs on…