More on: poetry

The river heaved our boat on its back. I loved how the narrowness of my life opened into that prairie of waves, big sky. One evening we saw the sun’s last rays lift an island from the water; rock and pines floated mid-air, unreachable mirage hanging like a painting of Saint John on Patmos dreaming…

In wisdom hunger lies. On black days, dress in black. Autumn is the echo of Winter. The name of the river’s curve is Leander. Take your cup from the tulip tree, your plate from the size of a spider. Rejoice! There is no choice in matter. If you would arrive, first leave. That is how…

Santa Cruz Island A white cotton shirt like my wife’s Loose over her Shoulders I’m thinking just Brushing Her breasts But Provençal or Basque this Woman or Italian perhaps Not blonde not Dutch but her skin like Skin like the peel Of skin next the bulb of a tulip The scent Of her the scent…

Santa Cruz Island First water and salt scud tailing twenty yards off A receding tide. Or stones first, the tide’s Measure and break. Or the word seal, for instance, This dead one’s skin slicker brined hard And cracked. Cell. Follicle. Division And increase. Wind first. Or absence. First, We’re not sure. Then upright walking. Another…

If you expect the open air and find instead your feet fast in the dust so that you slip at great speeds down a hard sky, then love it. Rebalance on your three left feet. Extend your right three tenderly, tapping one black tip at a time. And the glass is good, as is your…

In the moment my father died, we did not want to spend Another dollar for the twenty-four hours He would no longer be living In the Willow Haven full-care facility. We lobbied the nurses to credit the last moment He breathed among us. It was four-thirty am, April 26, 2007. Who in their right mind…

Forty times a day the journey of a lifetime Was the forty feet to the john Then falling into your chaise lounge, Spent sprinter, deep sea diver. Your oxygen line trailed after the weekends I drove down to sit a day or two: In the helmet of each breath, In your eighty-year-old bubble, We swung…

Wasp, genus hymenopterae Hymenaeus, the god of weddings These days we gods are diminished things, black winged. I float like the infinitesimal hesitation, the unheard breath after I: “I wasp will.” “I wasp do.” I am the sadness shadowing the speeches of fathers: “Now she’s wasp elegant, wasp a woman.” I’m the one hovering over…

after Caravaggio Everyone loves figs. Imagine the Virgin imagining figs Paint the girl in your studio modeling Mary as she stares past your shoulder at a plate of sliced figs. Imagine the cherubs imagining figs. Imagine green, Capucine yellow, imagine mercurial vermilion in the black background of a body, see my oiled wing as the…

After I decided the spectacular sewer pipes planted with hens and chicks were too tacky to keep, I started to love those succulent single moms, also called common houseleek and long ago planted on thatched roofs to protect homes from lightning bolts. Stone rose, sacred to Jupiter in the south, Thor in the north, emblem…