After the Tornado and other poems
After limb snap and tree crash, months
of air filled with sawdust and the sounds
of wood chippers and log loaders: a mountain
shorn,
Odin, The Man Fish and the Trickster God
Who can conjugate madness, shadows, apparitions from the untime of legend and myth–from the world always next to the commonest, simplest scenes of everyday life. Who can know the margin, the boundaries of it?
Homecoming
“So, are you going to go see him?” Bud asked, and when Earl answered, “See Who?”, Bud smirked and said, “See who, he asks…”
Memory of War & Elegies
When lightning wallowed in the orchard’s lap – / that raw, sudden violence from the clouds almost / offhand
Not a Woodpecker Anymore
We encouraged everyone to attend our reunions of embassy personnel once assigned to Bolivia. Nothing fancy. We gathered in homes around D.C., drank Bolivian beer and mate de coca, and ate salteñas and chuño.
from Spots of Time and other Fugitive Pieces
I suffered from it, deep pleasure that is, pride, an inward emotion which in this one spot of time taught me hubris
Thoughts & Thought
The same words / In the same sequence, / Everywhere we go.
The same people, / Echo pretense / About everything we know.
To The Critic
It’s monopoly and / you’re the banker / or craps and it’s / your right hand
This Bug is Flying in My Face and I’m a Little Stressed
Remember that timewe reclined in the carand your own wordssplit you in two? It was kind oflike when that cooking show ladywe always watched …
Crash Site
Anne convinces Dad to move into our upstairs guest room, a few weeks after the funeral. He and I haven’t spoken since the night …
The Music Teacher: A Love Story
“Music is love in search of a word.” – Sidney Lanier Mr.Adam Fisk, high school instrumental music teacher, stood looking out his bathroom window …
Etta Mai & Intermittent Waves
I stood tall at thirteen, / they asked me to kiss you / goodbye, it was what / you needed,
Telemedicine, or Thoughts on the Less Popular Side of this Issue
In his book, Technopoly, media theorist Neil Postman best describes the love affair tech people have with technology: “They gaze on technology as a …
All The Trembling Shadows
And all the trembling shadows, the waylaid verses, how darkening they become me now as I lean over this page, the shadows before me …
The Bedside Book of Chill
Like a mermaid’s nipple denied
the sea’s lesser chill,
we harden.
We tighten up.
Our Only Possible Success
People often ask me where it all began for me, and I say different things at different times, but usually I say this: It all began for me at Bronx Lebanon Hospital in December of 1970.
Dave & The Labour MP
I remembered you last week
leaning on the front gate
hair left in a photo album.
Fingers thicker than January wind.
Trouble in Mind
1. The Esopus Creek is a gushing brown torrent this fall from the September rain, but the trees surrounding the creek shimmer with red, …
The Hurt & The Intruder
The Hurt Red-faced, open-mouthed–a silent scream in front of me–you press your small hands to your sides. At six, you live a pain so …
Rogue Sparks & Other Poems
Rogue Sparks Coming this way is cigarette ember, put out on metal receptacle ridge, wetted down with ocean air and admiral fell promises of …
Work
1. The Donnelly Manufacturing Company I was a graduate student. I needed money, a summer job. The clerk at the state unemployment office frowned …
Snow and Crocuses & Ancient Horses
Snow and Crocuses 1. Snow and Crocuses Thanksgiving ahead, and first snows, snows and crocuses, Wordsworthian spring, implying daffodils. But first there’ll be holidays …
Judith in Old Age & Other Poems
The Songbird Market Beijing, a man with the faith of ages Turns to offer a courteous reception. We have come to see about a …
The Fey Daughter
Five weeks after the hospital in Oaxaca called to tell us that Mom had died of complications from a drug overdose, her ashes arrived …
Come Back & Loom
Come Back I will paint you over. I will revise each line. I’ll stand immersed in the dregs without a coat of stones, an …
Scapegoat Borough and other poems
Munitions Magnanimity The targets for the tolerant came with a gun rack and delayed viral police how-to videos: A ticking clock mock-calm after the …
Prophesies & Fire and Rain
Prophesies The white blossoms fallen to the furrow rise again and swirl on March breeze past branches bearing the green buds of plums. The …
Not Art but Apery
More Like Horace Under a green and wilted sky, the heat softens and obscures me. Too slack to eulogize my cousin, who died of …
Unfinished
I have bought some of your supplies. Sparse, random: a thin brush and a squat black marker, a half-full bottle of linseed oil, a …
News From North Country
News From North Country The bright-eyed buxom broadcaster in thick makeup her mother never quite taught her to brush on correctly suddenly engulfs and swallows …
Tough Luck
I Curse Thee While standing on your head. Like peanut butter. From Carlsbad Cavern. I curse thee in milk. By the string of the …
Some New Sky
The psychic held Lydia’s palm aloft, tracing the lines with black nails. Months ago, Lydia would have called bullshit and gone back through the …
Hjörleifshöfði
growing old at once sober inside the thought of the time you stood on a black cliff, over a black desert, in a martian …
A Small Grief & Other Poems
Peccadillo The church bells ring each hour precisely three minutes too soon, and everyone in town shrugs off that resounding, persistent defect, performs the …
Jost in the Machine
Jost had a job to do, and he would do it. He was as old-fashioned and square as a woodcut of a laborer carved …
Fawn & Great Grandfather
The Fawn Found dead in the neighbor’s yard a humid morning in July. The flies already at its eyes, its neck bent back over …
Ann’s Visit
Too much August; it must be parceled night by night ingested in slippery hours. Outside the theater we find ourselves lost, wander into the …
Nada Among the Epics
For the longest time Nada was two things: one, greenblue peacock eyes that sparkle big whenever she readied herself to say something, and two, …
DELTA 4: BEFORE DEPARTING FOR LAS POZAS WITH EDWARD JAMES MY SON SCHOOLS ME ON STRETCH ARMSTRONG
Egeria densa clogs sloughs, especially during low water. Love is a lie the cup tells the coffee for the mouth. Even the eye can’t …
Excavations 3 & Night Journey
Excavations 3 A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. – Robert …
Intentions Against Translation and Other Poems
One Moment in the Middle of Things Virginia Beach, the late 80s – dying already. A pale imitation of its former self, the shops …
Garage Sale Wedding
An apple seed is stuck to a midnight tree branch. It swells and seeps red honey, sticks close to trunk-hollow and bird’s nest. What …
The Big Waitress
My three best friends in high school were older and a bad influence. There was Pile, who loved Led Zeppelin and Hostess Twinkies. Then …
Modern Metaphysics
Avihs || Vishnu Mornings || they disperse || beyond || the corn Fields, || separately. ||Sunday She || throws Her partner’s computer || (midnight) …
Sostenuto Avenue
I sit above Sostenuto Avenue at my window in a third-floor walk-up. I’ve been on the avenue nigh on sixty years and at my …
Poetic Meridian of Paul Celan
To hear the axis of Earth, Earth’s axis – Osip Mandelstam The first time I heard about Paul Celan was many years ago, back …
Mother Tongue
Folds in an ancient fuselage orchestrate an arrangement of accents. Each accent is an accident. A moist white shirt like a waiting moon sways …
Surfing in Catal Hyuk
It would be impossible for anyone to lead a more ordinary life than Bobby Parker, whose life was ordinary to the extent that the …
from Maquettes for a Season of Fury
Dead Women in Old Stories Above the hills a starry slate the lights on the coast a necklace weight of faded-flower …
Rinda’s Moniker
It’s a melancholy chamber, willow wallpaper and a power-steam humidifier trying to spread calm across six pews sulking on either side of a narrow …
Finding their letters
Knowing that people used to communicate with each other and express their feelings through hand-written texts made me feel somehow sad for being born …
Storm Flight
How disappointed the first flyers must have been to finally rise above the feathery white heavens and not find themselves surrounded by angels but …
View & Spring – Poems
View A white petal falls as the bee drinks the Mandarin bloom then moves on. Purple and red tin pots with orange flowers …
Down to the Desert & At the Corner
At the Corner At the corner of Division & Reclamation where the town is split between chaos & choice, the edge where you look …
Empty Towns and Other Poems
Meeting the Resistance In her twenties during World War II she joined the Netherlands resistance and cycled out to meet newcomers dropped by …
The Piano Player
Frank felt edgy all week. Preparations for Bennett & Co.’s RESTORE AMERICA fund-raising tour were taking over all his time: petitioning the state for …
My Father’s Axe and Other Poems
Boundaries Lucy, boundaries might be made of Roman stone walls or hedges, but they’re boundaries all the same. I would walk through the English …
Midwest Storm Cellar Sequence
1. Revisionist Ministry of the Martians Seared almost scorched, rolling potato eyes and broccoli heads now dead, this medicated dedicated bougie meditator’s Sternoed noodle soul …
Downtown Shadows & Other Poems
Henry Miller’s Typewriter How did you know that I dreamt about Henry Miller’s typewriter last night? Stolid gray Remington, with a bloodshot aura, green …
Water Harp
1 At the window, last night’s words, ashen Against the glass Black petals in the vase, delicate As the hour fading from us Their …
Four Poems
Miss Dolly Bumfrey We bear Muscat To your sick by traction. Making headway at that driving test Was the needles up-and-up. Annihilating two easy-natured …
from Broken Glosa
Rae Armantrout: I put a glose on you Habitat-themed enclosure. Zen-inflected mug. Around the block dogs bark at absence. Habitat (entire poem) ― …
Try This On – Three Poems
How I Like My Women I like my women slight and frail, bones hollowly light, ribcages pressed like prison bars against the skin. I love …
A Painting Balla Called Flight of the Swallows
you ask me how I occupy myself in my dreams well, if I see one I see the rest I am not an optimist …
The Forsythia in Bloom etc.
The Forsythia in Bloom Suddenly in the early spring evening the forsythia bush is aflame with light, a monastery with hundreds of cells. Throughout …
Milton’s Well etc.
Milton’s Well Predestination stopped her on the road, speeding in some overcommitment, racing impetuous down green skylines, pushing the envelope of the just-possible. On …
For Fred etc.
For Fred (Veteran’s Day, November 11th, 2004) We miss you, Mr. Rodgers. You told us straight. You were not purple Mr. Rodgers, not an …
Fragments of the Human Heart
1. I will say our secret… a stone holding its own weight we were lovers holding each other warm in the unfolding there was …
By Jupiter! By Bacchus! etc.
By Jupiter! By Bacchus!: Against Humility In the black ooze of the sky, where golden spangling stars alight, Jupiter, alone at its zenith …
Pieta, Detroit
Pieta, Detroit He’d been dead an hour when she came, Ambulance waiting, no hurry now. Her oldest boy. She cradled him, Lifeless, nothing like …
Daylilies At Night etc.
Daylilies At Night Lilies which open half-sullen pods in the night As if lightning bugs, the torso’s involuntary Lucent flash, and then the equally …
Not Black And White etc.
Not Black & White Joey was swimming in Sulphur Creek, mother can tell because his eyes are yellow, and he reeks of rotten eggs. …
The Midal Charm etc.
The Midal Charm In a white canoe The river takes her home Tired and alone With her chin on her knees She dreams …
Where The Land Moves On Forever
Where The Land Moves On Forever 1. Siringitu, the Maasai named it, the sepia expanse of grassland, and marshes that stretches to a blur …
To Theseus and Other Poems
Mis En Scène: A Wet Season The graceless way in which you wooed me positions itself, transfigures itself into a scene (complete with …
Evidence of Obsession
Memento Fr. 1 Aotearoa is the savage place, seeding A heap of broken images, mixing Mortuary photos with life But this went further as …
Resurrection Suite
The Dead Zone North from Kiev, empty roads The light of other summers opens among the pages. In the photograph, your face, …
Head Up, Chin Down Straight
Bob can play a number of instruments, none of them well. He likes his guitar, an Ovation with a sensual, curving back. The guitar …
The Magic Orgy of the Pig
Now, this was not one of those cases in which a pig is killed in sacrifice and its private parts are gluttonously coveted …
Five Poems
Eight Months On Time, tidewater near, headlong has ripened you to this glowing fullness, clumsy in dormant love. Nothing can take you back to …
The Autobiography of Somebody Else
1. The End I went home—after three hungry years, a dozen awful addresses, and too many leftover 60s prophets and 80s mental patients, and …
Bone White Death
Venerable Xoratio Rey is now very ill and there is no hope he will be able to live out his dream. That is why …
La Estupidez de Cosas
Rush hour was over but traffic in the city was still bad. The long summer days kept the streets busy. Chuy did not like …
One Oh For Tilly
It didn’t announce itself, the difference in the room, but it was there, of that he was positive. It wasn’t the soft caress of …
A Wink For Luck
Abbott, West Virginia, the town with a funny name, was a funny place to live. Needing somewhere to hang for the winter, I settled …