Poetry

tears for things As for empathy, it was breakfast that 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. Food was just the beginning. I pitied the drooping head of the desk lamp, the light bulb its burning out. I endowed…

An hour before the time to quit, he sat on the wall that was lying on the floor, that we had been framing and I still working around, my hammer’s momentum fading. And tired myself, I sat next to him as he untied his shoe, undid
 the double-knotted bow, then pulled slack into the lacing…

Home this Christmas, the city buried in snow, I approach slowly the frozen fold of earth where his parents laid him. There is above his body not the smallest suggestion of snow. No skidding windblown foliage. Only the flags of our people pulsing on their tiny sticks. The swept grass glittering. We grow the empire’s…

for Yasi I too love small streets— those orphans who don’t want us to make a fuss over them but are delighted when a stranger shows up and walks through, by choice or chance. Big History is never there, though the residents often display a quiet dignity worthy of long years’ note. Birds always hop…

I have spent most of my life walking From one place to another not in the natural World but the built world of cities sometimes Going from one to another then zigzagging Around them street to street walking Everywhere I went not briskly but saunter Was my pace and my speed resembled the turtle’s Or…

Time is led by its interrogators into 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…

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 know parts you can damage and be fine.” Marbles I could pick out with my fingers, blue dye soaks…

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

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, exhaling a lost wherewithal. And yet you have advantages: too big to fail, you shake down squid—whole ecologies!—with stylish slaps of a trigger tail. What means ye by beaching,…