More on: Poetry

No one knows anymore. Or any less, for who can ever be sure about once. Or upon a time, as if time were a chair. For there was a time when time was more or less sparrow. Sparrow yes and sparrow no. Sparrow the answer answering all the questions. So. The people would put the…

can be disconcerting take it from one who’s been there hobbling on rubber legs through fifty shades of graves to end up riding down a metal tunnel that kept screeching ha! haha! ha! your body strapped to a gurney where (ha ha!) if you blinked the whole insane scenario would have to be replayed and…

You feet! I resign myself to you—I know what you —–mean, I behold in my hands your soft heel, your crooked toes I shape like couplets a cow’s hide, I make it understand —–the length of your walk, the refrain of your adventures, —–the places you will see I put bows on the pink shoes…

Modern coins the sizes of shine swept off my friend’s bureau in Ghent and pocketed by my careless habit— not brown pennies too dull to return they include designer Devlin’s sculpture of the duckbilled animal swimming up to the top swirl and five kangaroo tails mixed to a dollar. When the Irish attained their republic…

1. Doesn’t everybody get a strange life? Don’t we all get to walk around inside ourselves all day long and sleep there through the whole night? Don’t we all have permanent access to the magnum and the minimum opus, the rising up and the sinking down? Aren’t we granted the right to refrain from occupying…

Of a misty, low-sky morning pressed ——–upon the north sound islands there, just beyond our glassy cove, one might draw ——–yet another sip from the steaming mug and find that, yes, there is so little ——–to be known, so much to be supposed. There beyond the concrete breakwater, ——–the seiner’s skiff begins drawing out the…

When my mother awakened me as a child, her face was the entire room. Later, it was the bishop’s torso that was the whole nave. Confronting me was a blue density, the body from the ribs up. In my memory I am unable to recover the face or the words. I know there was a…

What is at first staring at birds on a wire sooner or later if you think about it becomes staring into air. This was the kind of staring I was doing the day of the blessing, face to face with the bishop, which was also the day I understood longitude and latitude by way of…

Zipped inside a nylon whale, breathing air pumped into that fishy tent, hard not to think of Jonah, sorry and scarved in seaweed, hard not to picture the ship receding, huge watery acres of abyss, breakers sweeping over. And jaws, the tight squeeze through baleen, stew of stomach acid… Until then, easy for him to…

I wouldn’t call gulping a glass of ale and backhanding foam off your upper lip a form of devotion, or the refusal to laugh at an off-color joke a sign of reverence. But I could imagine God, a wounded rat in one hand, a soothing song— I do not say on his lips. No, it’s…