Poetry |
“Primum Mobile”
“Without / heat, a drop of water would / bounce, forever, and a heart would simply / jangle, eternal bell.”
Poetry |
“Lucky Man” & “Stella D’Oro”
“And he’d earned one stamp at least, because, // he said to Val, just making sure, those cans of soup / she was ringing up were five for $5, and he bought ten …”
Poetry |
“magnificent height” & “[and what we have come to, says ‘childless’]”
magnificent height here in the non-light of evening i am not magnetic or ringed or blue like a sliver no sentiment arrives and the ceiling is one magnificent height and the man at the restaurant says he will buy me all 63 of saturn's moons to get away with something…
Poetry |
“For Our Fathers Teetering in Retirement” & “Quarry”
“Leisure escapes me / when I look straight at it. Only work / of a certain kind appeases me. A phase / I think I’ll pass through. Get ready, / says the snapper, for what comes after.”
Poetry |
“The Reader,” “A Snail,” “The Rabbits” & “Anniversary”
“As a child I ate rabbit, though I didn’t know it. My father / kept them in hutches along our high back fence. //. We fed them a bit, but mostly kept away — the mothers / would eat the babies if we bothered them too much, he told us.”
Poetry |
“Blue Oracle” & “We Forgot”
“I was born into violence, of word, / of body, but we did not speak of it outside our house. / We never spoke of it inside either. I didn’t know / what happened there happened elsewhere …”
Poetry |
“Poem In Which I Insist This Is A Good Day“
“The textile mills in my hometown / in Rhode Island are mostly dead. My parents are both dead. They wore / heart monitors with sticky tape and both took Coumadin / which thins the blood.”
Poetry |
“Imperial Virus (Scarab)”
“… He had affixed himself / to the side of my sandal like a brooch. / As I realized who he was, I could feel I was about // to be frightened: stopped myself.”
Poetry |
“Nothing So Beautiful” & “Under all there’s little difference”
“Yesterday, I had faith in the spindle / of an aspen / and the taut skin / of a flat blue sky / I knew the alphabet / rolling across the tongue / the way the wind knows far- / flung leaves”
Poetry |
“Nightly,” “Under a Cloudless Sky” & “Aubade with Selfies”
“If I think of a field of wheat in September, tawny and rippling, can I set it aflame? Will the fire kneel after it consumes every stalk?”
Poetry |
“Dear Mother VI” & “For the Tired Ones”
“It’s not that beautiful things must live. / But they look like the butterflies children draw, / & if we’re killing even beautiful things / what chance is there?”
Poetry |
“Right to Life” & “Burying Jews Since 1973”
“Look, it isn’t lonely here / any more than an idea is lonely // before it shows up (or not) in your mind. You know that feeling / when it half-exists? That’s the beauty of / The Void.”
Poetry |
“From the Body”
“we longed for wet darkness the aftermath / of burial and that fractioning of flesh / far in the circular currents of the earth”
Poetry |
“Self-Facing Ghazal” & “The Body is Nothing but Stories”
“Ochre, vermillion, and deep blue gashes / cohere in one of the truest records of a face // you knew best from dwelling in it, your gaze / focused for endless months on another’s face.”
Poetry |
“Constellations”
“On my back at the physical / therapist’s office I consider / why in the tiles overhead // the spray of holes / echoes a starfield photograph …”