Poetry

World’s End

And anywhere at all will do To bring it off, to see it through From soup to nuts via the gods And all the other odds and sods Not needed on the voyage, so Fire the sunset gun: let’s go, A positively final tour Of what we know now as before— Not to presuppose an…

Plume

On the outskirts of Reykjavik I find myself slapping the ass of a thick-piled Viking horse, sending up a plume of dust and gas that all but obscures the scrawl on parchment of a jet plane, sending up a pall the likes of which I don’t recall since a ruse I pulled on my mother….

Laying the Fire

I am downstairs early looking for something to do when I find my father on his knees at the fireplace in the sitting room sweeping ash from around and beneath the grate with the soft brown hand-brush he keeps especially for this. Has he been here all night waiting to catch me out? So far…

Night Steps

I’ll never forget the wind the corner whispered, nor the windowed darkness that was more a frame for the world’s highrise loneliness. I’ll never forget the days we lingered beneath our fingerprints and how we were each other’s private sacrament. Brooms and mops hung behind doors like secret agents. The crooks of our knees ached…

All De Doo-Dah Day

Way down in Egypt’s land, meaning Memphis, I watched a party waltz the gangplank, preening past a peacock preening on the dock. Antebellum ball-gown frippery complemented Confederate gray, every man a colonel or above, and the ladies pealed flippant imitations of a cavalier past until one sweet peach enfolded in crinoline refused another’s “nigger-lipped” cigarette…

Envoi

Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lost its wintered savor—my skeptic’s mewling cries fritter out across the sad Atlantic’s no man’s land. If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom? Estrangement—it had seemed so accidental— was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity. It wasn’t that randoms fingered…