Poetry

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,…

I am a vanilla cupcakeand I’ve come to tell you exactly how I feel.When a vanilla cupcake speaksyou 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 anxiousabout satisfying some desires before I…

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 fluid in the…

By the window in the fancy hotel— looking out, looking out with them. A little coffee. A little cake. These things have come for me. And not a secret, but apparent from which I come out of how I could stand back, and let happen the birds, and the sea, and the sky. I woke…

Houston, 1953 Masses of one un-housedhousehold added to another, all abandoned and madeto abandon their names. A non-colonnadeof gray clods. A un-quadrangleof neo-rational obliteration. An arcadeof ashes. Ditch-buriedhordes of kin left akimbo, an imprisonednecropolis on the verge of the vast acres of the settledprecincts of our planet—or maybe at the edge of the salted fieldof…

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

It’s just like the tongue, isn’t it, to fold you up into a tiny origami swan whose angled wings splay and whose jutted neck and beak point out over some expanse of water a tugboat hauling the mammoth frigate upstream the reckless kayaker tickling an eddy the currents changing temperature beneath your feet as you…

Sidewalk vendors look askance when I ask Am I headed East or West? I could tell them I navigate by the sky’s color but it wrong-foots me time and again. What sky? they say, looking up. The one that cracked wide one bright September, while we were looking away, the one that enchanted Portuguese cartographers,…