More on: Poetry

By dint of going wrong all will come right.                     —proverb ° Where outside the mind is this place like mind, unmappable, this un-, this ir-, this sub-? What coffin text— honeycombs, laurel sprigs, lyres, among syllabograms—chiseled here with ouroboros and zero glyphs for eternal reading…

Little monotony, crow come to my window, why start my day with your cracked, raucous notes? You know the kind of music you profess unasked for works its way into my bones, shakes me as only thunderheads’ bleak rain unsettles me, insisting on a correspondence. I have to reach far down into my distances, my…

“I’m not the kind of heaven you thought you’d find,” the sky said, spreading itself across the floor here, in the kitchen, its gold leaf freaked and split as it appeared and disappeared and stained the morning with its radiance. —————————-“And furthermore, you’re not my idea of a prophet or a sage. But here we…

for Mary Oliver In the evening I killed a dozen flies against the glass of the window not caring for the noise they made or to see them flecking the table where we had eaten They were trying to escape had scrawled their curlicues all afternoon and could not have understood the cruelty of glass…

All night he was wind leaning on a door you wanted to open. The whole world spilled through the hole he’d torn in his side. He had nothing to say that wasn’t your name. In his teeth his own blood turned brown. You had to see him naked, name those animal scars in their torchlight…

They wished they could take their friends with them when they moved. It wasn’t far, trading one small town for another, not even a hundred miles across the state line. A point of pride to keep in touch, long distance calls on Sundays after supper, person-to-person for Carleen to catch them up on the local…

1. A patch of nothing the size of a nickel above the nape, smooth moon, the beginning of myth, the spread of skin and each morning’s sheddings at the feet, each little swirl, a parable, unblessed.  2. Forced to lose the one crow-shined feature I’d been allowed, each week another round found, spots, pale and…

There was a man who filmed a wild bird perched lightly on his knee, an eastern phoebe, and how I wish it had been me to receive a little sign the tide might turn, shift. Think my rod, my staff, the craft of conjuring a little belief, a field of grass, a clear horizon line.…

As if we would remember only this—the perfect dust— How we slaked it, how it cost next to nothing, twenty-five Cents American, those sweating green twenty-five-milliliter bottles, Quaffing that nutty flavor, our privileged deprivation, Loving it more, that entire year, because there was In a city of ten million no other lager. This is what…

Sometimes the mind rises only into its own sky The day gone to wind and last night’s rain Our names skipping like flat rocks Across someone else’s hopscotch Where once you scratched your Xs and Os. Or was that tic-tac-toe, tally where no one Should ever win, though you can blunder Badly, losing in the…