Poetry |
“Exodus,” “Rubies,” “We Were Supposed to Share” & “Slowness”
“But I’m now tattered sliced / assaulted. / The gulls cry as if they miss / water yet it’s near. / What if you’re the water I miss?”
Poetry |
“Requiem,” “Breviary” & “Causa Sui”
“At the funeral mass, my father asked me to tie his tie. / A parishioner approached, and asked him who died. / My wife, he said, every word an elevation to climb.”
Poetry |
“Sometimes It’s Good to Stop Talking”
“I solved all the problems, all / the road blocks // to world peace, yesterday, while / under the influence // at the dentist.”
Poetry |
“Self-Portrait as Sarcophagus with Nail File and Anger,” “The End” & “Body Language”
“It felt so stupid to be afraid / of you. Still does. / Thinking I would be safe / if I became the place to hide.”
Poetry |
“Hotel-Dieu,” “Fine” & “The Mockingbird Was Doing the Jay”
?I’m addressing you, invader of my dream, / with your guns-and-God tattoo, your slow car // driving over the day lilies, circling back / to mock my lawn sign’s love …”
Poetry |
“These are some of the poems I read today,” “I went to the museum and stood staring at a chicken,” “If only the cute nannies at the park would trade glances at me” & “In Alice Notley’s poem ‘I must have called and so he comes'”
“Then I sat reading a book about the women who clean / other people’s houses, written by one of the women / homeowners. I thought about how the world is divided / between the books you start to read and the ones you don’t.”
Poetry |
“unknown caller”
“the threads that tie you to this life will break / and break you / again and again you will remember the warmth / that resides in the garment is not the garment itself”
Poetry |
“Onset of Dusk at Wood’s Gulch” & “Some Nights”
“That dark’s too dark to measure distance true — / have you edged close to what I fear for you …”
Poetry |
“Solstice”
“Winter dulls the world and / the yearly deaths begin. / I can see a distance through the woods now.”
Poetry |
“Before the End of Time”
“Last night the moon shone so near, it seemed / a neighbor’s yard had flung its sundial skyward, // time to give a proper send-off to the cosmos”
Poetry |
“This Time Next Year”
“Fifteen minutes into the rain, the papier-mâché torso / of the makeshift guerrilla statue gets soggy // and the likeness of the dissident hero / bows to every passing commuter.”
Poetry |
“Garden Augur”
“As if the fox while I was fasting / had run a blade / slit its prey / gobbled the guts & // left a skeletal coat …”
Poetry |
“Pilgrims” & “Postcard”
“This is a cross-state / drive of faded billboards, endless sagebrush, // crowded rest stops and unemployed landmarks, / a countryside the boy quietly grows to accept, // until they reach the first signs of city life …”
Poetry |
“Young Widowhood (ending in the ICU)” & “Monitors”
“Your usual grief is thick, pervasive, oozing / over everything, but tonight it’s erratic, an itchy // tag that scrapes your waist and some days you think of him / less …”
Poetry |
“Eleanor Remembers”
“It was the kind of town where if your neighbors / saw you walking, they assumed you’d lost your license — / too many DUIs — or your car, too many payments // missed.”