Poetry

Meadow

The butterfly is solar-powered; it floats around the clearing, where the light is strong. When it comes to the perimeter of shade, it turns, and glides back into the clearing. It doesn’t use more energy than it requires, and we have never seen a butterfly that kept on growing bigger and bigger, from the size…

Banks of a Canal

  Gustave Caillebotte, c. 1872 Say “canal” and there’s that final vowel Towing silence with it, slowing time To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still. The stunted concrete mocks the classical. Water says, “My place here is in dream, In quiet good standing. Like a…

Super Moon

The third one of the year it rose all over so close it smelled the fried oil of our dinners— its very nearness altered what we knew as it called to us in waves of no-sound, thinking its no-think, about circles. After it rose from super into moon, two smaller moons signaled from each car,…

Vanilla Cupcake Complaint

I am a vanilla cupcake and I’ve come to tell you exactly how I feel. When a vanilla cupcake speaks you ought to show respect for its appeal, and wonder what this cupcake will reveal. Anxious and puzzled, basically, is how I feel. Anxious about getting sick and getting old, and then dying. Also quite…

First Poem

In the dream he was a hawk with blood on its beak. In the dream he was a hawk. In the dream he was a woman, naked, indolent from pleasure, a gleam of sperm on her vaginal lips. In the dream he was a woman. (He could both be the woman and see the viscid…

Canasta

Houston, 1953 Masses of one un-housed household added to another, all abandoned and made to abandon their names. A non-colonnade of gray clods. A un-quadrangle of neo-rational obliteration. An arcade of ashes. Ditch-buried hordes of kin left akimbo, an imprisoned necropolis on the verge of the vast acres of the settled precincts of our planet—or…

Wellfleet, Off-Season

The walls inside the city buildings curve, glass and plaster bending in thigh-shape, or breast-shape, a comfort to patients in RECEPTION, waiting to have their griefs or gallbladders removed, tumors and proud flesh pulled from the body, snipped off by the healer who has no sodden breast to offer in return, no nutriment, but only…