Poetry

for J.G.   I am powerless to change a thing. But Let me fool you, sweetly, with my pen Or better still, my fingers, and if not With my fingers, then my tongue— Wherever you feel yourself turned To wood, wherever a joint is thick Pinned into a pleat or crook, trapping You in twists…

Into the mute and blue- green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go though not for that which I’m going. I deserve to go, and not alone, because I did not sing loud enough about this life, this world. Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not. There were too many things I saw…

The war that so many would like to forget, and so many others refuse to remember.   Thank you for the relief, the rest, for leaving only palimpsest and a little rolled orange eraser dust, and not the xxxxx of a stitched-up wound, when you came to do what erasers do. The way you rubbed…

Plaintive 1 They asked me, “what do you think of the smell of money, the smell of a woman and the smell of the sea?” I held firm. Night wavered and people were singing. The smell of the sea I know, I said, but I am not an informer. The smell of a woman is…

for Bob Kennedy   Thank you for the trilobite, Its four hundred million years (Approximately) parceled With tissue paper and two Elastic bands, carefully. Set free by your hammer blow From the muddy blackness Of deep Ordovician seas, It finds its way in sunlight To Carrigskeewaun, eyeless At the fireside among bleached Bones and raven…

Translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika   Here, everyone smokes. In the evening each wife recognizes her husband by the faraway glint of his cigarette at the end of the cobblestone street.   When the glint pulses frequently wives feel the storm coming and rush to warm dinner in the fire. But when it’s…

gwyneth lewis Fluctuations of Going     My objective is never to touch it.     No such thing as a naughty clock, give it     Its head, I say, serve                   The natural tendency to ebb                   And flow…                                   When amplitude                                                           drops                                                                       the clock                                   Starts racing—     Added to which, in winter     Ground water affecting foundations of the tower     Alters the angle…

Lord, there are creatures in the understory, snails with whorled backs and silver boots, trails beetles weave in grass, black rivers of ants, unbound ladybugs opening their wings, spotted veils and flame, untamed choirs of banjo-colored crickets and stained-glass cicadas. Lord, how shall we count the snakes and frogs and moths? How shall we love…

A chunk of metal cubed and spat out by a car-crushing baling press, a Ford, twenty years old, seemingly red, last driven by a teenaged girl who failed to check the oil, a gift from a doting grandmother with a terror of squashing squirrels recklessly crossing the road, and drove the car only to church;…