Poetry

tears for things As for empathy, it was breakfastthat taught me first the feelings      of objects. Each wet Cheerio floated there despairing,it seemed, to be—bare      raft—wrenched like that from its family. Foodwas just the beginning. I pitied      the drooping head of the desk lamp, the light bulb its burning out. I endowedwith the pathos of…

An hour before the time to quit, he saton the wall that was lying on the floor, that we had been framingand I still working around,my hammer’s momentum fading. And tired myself, I sat next to himas he untied his shoe, undid
the double-knotted bow, then pulled slack into the lacingthrough each eye, one after another….

Home this Christmas, the cityburied in snow, I approachslowly the frozen fold of earthwhere his parents laid him. There isabove his body notthe smallest suggestion of snow. Noskidding windblown foliage. Onlythe flags of our people pulsingon their tiny sticks. The sweptgrass glittering. We growthe empire’s dead devotedly herein Ohio. On FridaysI watched from the stands…

for Yasi I too love small streets—those orphans who don’t want usto make a fuss over thembut are delighted when a strangershows up and walks through,by choice or chance. Big Historyis never there, though the residentsoften display a quiet dignity worthyof long years’ note. Birds alwayshop on the concrete—the scrawnytrees always seem a little nakedeven…

I have spent most of my life walkingFrom one place to another not in the naturalWorld but the built world of cities sometimesGoing from one to another then zigzaggingAround them street to street walkingEverywhere I went not briskly but saunterWas my pace and my speed resembled the turtle’sOr even the snail or sometimes even the…

Time is led by its interrogatorsinto a round room with a domed glass ceiling.Ranged along the wall, strange numerals stand,mossy columns salvaged from some forgotten god’s temple.In the center of the room, on a small table,rest two black hands, cut off at the wrists,frozen in the pose of a pianist’sthe moment before the crescendo.The hands…

Fog on everything. Mountains white.Few things more beautiful than a swollen brain lit by dye tracers,a flare opening the broken sections, filled with our history.My father tells me, “these things are hard to knowparts you can damage and be fine.” Marbles I could pick out with my fingers,blue dye soaks the tissue, until the screen…

                I walked to the lake. I passed the Hooters, the Publix, the                     McDonald’swhere I sometimes use the Internet to grade papers                when my neighbor’s Internet is down. I passed the Wendy’s,                     and the ScottishRites temple, whatever that is. When I got to the coffee shop,                I ran into Vince and John and we talked…

What’s your whisper number, honey?Your point of roll-over or sell? Adrift you lumber, money pit and money doll,dispensing a sense of portly doom, exhalinga lost wherewithal. And yet you have advantages: too big to fail,you shake down squid—wholeecologies!—with stylish slaps of a trigger tail. What means ye by beaching,bleached, titanic paradox? Malnourished, listless,you can reach…