Poetry

Elegy for No One

So many have died, to pick just one seems willful, unkind, and besides you might forget the friend you promised never to forget, so let this be  for anyone who died in this season of death, which from now on will be full of faces coming forward, smiling from the page like the line hastily…

Aporia

Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval Ocean, there is none without shipwrecks, without the drowned without victims there is no     ocean that does not lick the shore     like a sore     or a wound.

Elegy for the Road

Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval       I ask where the things go that did not arrive at their destination. The majority of things. The largest inventory in the world. Where are they going to end up, the things that do not end up anywhere. Those that fail, those that have no remedy….

Blame Game

Pin the ozone layer on me: I drove my Hummer into the sky when I gunned through a red light. I hit outer space; I clearly went too far. It’s hard to tweeze apart a hole from the everyday emptiness of air. Hard to touch upon a hole & not sail right through. One day…

Please and Thank You

Say no now and you will get off easy. Maybe. The firebrand in your heart is only a rental, Just a spent ember with nothing left to do Than plead guilty, not no contest. Now go, Go to your room and gawk, or else text-message Yourself, write runes, or if the rhinencephalon In your boiling…

The Sacred Harp Book

If I get religious for a minute, it will be to keep terms with the bewildered caul of being thirteen, surrounded by the dead. What used to peek through the roof, never so much stroking string things and eating afterlife biscuits, as making sound like a wonky piano dragging its broken leg in an interminable…

Song of Myself

after Issa I think it’s enough just to sit and meditate, heedless of the needs of others close to us and of their perpetual demands that seem to sap the strength from us. My doorway and the morning dew are all I need to make my day, and that is where I’ll plan to be….

House of Wigs

The sky was low. His head was a vase of sorrows he wanted to fill with blossoms. He stepped into the House of Wigs. The saleslady said, “Try this one on. It’s called the Mind of Fire. It turns ashes into flame. Prometheus was wearing it, they say, when he was punished by the Gods…