plates shifting under building facades and whipped decor,
seas rising and falling at the edge of amusements
and surf. The migrations migrating elsewhere,
monarchs lost on their way south, children coming north
in droves on their way to anywhere else.
The city of lost souls blowing in the Santa Ana winds
and ...Read more

Jonah found
a frog in the currants
thirsty, he said, so we flicked water on it
& it sat still throat pulsing
bright-greener than the stem, feet spread, attached to the stem

Three people one frog thousands of currants
Basho, anyone, why write it down


About this poem
"This ...Read more

1
Before going to bed I take off my bracelet. It is meant to protect me. A dancer gave it to me: for decades she has known sorrow and beauty. Beloveds have come and gone. Mountains and forest fires. Lives that might have lived through her, but didn't. Lives that do still live through her. I go to sleep, protected by her love, even though ...Read more

I will mix me a drink of stars,-
Large stars with polychrome needles,
Small stars jetting maroon and crimson,
Cool, quiet, green stars.
I will tear them out of the sky,
And squeeze them over an old silver cup,
And I will pour the cold scorn of my Beloved into it,
So that my drink shall be bubbled with ...Read more

Life! Ay, what is it? E'en a moment spun
From cycles of eternity. And yet,
What wrestling 'mid the fever and the fret
Of tangled purposes and hopes undone!
What affluence of love! What vict'ries won
In agonies of silence, ere trust met
A manifold fulfillment, and the wet,
Beseeching eyes saw splendors ...Read more

The old man sitting out front
on the empty patio eating
fried chicken or something or other,
bought up the block probably, and not
from the house of sushi
we were entering,
didn't inspire confidence exactly,
but when you returned
from the wall of fame to our table
with your chopsticks
...Read more

How much our hands are God's
to be running fingers over braille cities.
We are this hand pushed through our womb.

Weeping with each other's blood in our eyes.

I dreamed that I slept with the light on.

I was asleep in my mother's bed because my father was out to sea

and my claim on ...Read more

The yards grow ghosts. Between the limbs and wings,
bleached street-lit things, I'm best at moving on.
Hunt-heavy, gray, slunk overlow like so
much weight got in the way, my shape's the shape
of something missed, flash-pop or empty frame.
Though you could say I've made a game of this,
and though midtrickery it...Read more

A bookkeeping man,
tho one sure to knock on wood,
and mostly light

at loose ends-my friend
who is superstitiously funny, & always
sarcastic-save once,

after I'd told him
about Simone's first time
walking-a toddler,

almost alone, she'd
gripped her sweater, right hand...Read more

Whatever hid the sun and moon inside a mountain
brought people there to found the night
where a city swans on river water
laving with light each passing wake,
mesmerizing a couple on the riverbrink.
They seem unaware what is myth
or real, taken up, as it were, by a swan's bill
and flown to a milkwater ...Read more

When haughty expectations prostrate lie,
And grandeur crouches like a guilty thing,
Oft shall the lowly weak, till nature bring
Mature release, in fair society
Survive, and Fortune's utmost anger try;
Like these frail snow-drops that together cling,
And nod their helmets smitten by the wing
Of many a ...Read more

Passers-by
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blent
To form the city's afternoon roar
Hindering an old silence.

Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in...Read more

To dream of your ardor
is much joy and much happiness.
Your ardor tells me that
I am making a mistake
by not taking hold of what
is offered to me.

What I mean when I say
"your ardor" is stenciled on
the air that surrounds
your big face. The force
of your ardor pushes strangely. <...Read more

Alarmed, today is a new dawn,
and that affair recurs daily like clockwork,
undone at dusk, when a new restaurant
emerges in the malnourished night.

We said it would be this way, once this became
the way it was. So in a way we were

waiting for it. I still haven't eaten, says the cook
in the ...Read more

I could tell they were father and son,
the air between them, slack as though
they hardly noticed one another.

The father sanded the gunwales,
the boy coiled the lines.
And I admired them there, each to his task

in the quiet of the long familiar.
The sawdust coated the father's arms
...Read more

What you have not done
is without error. What you
have not said is beyond contradiction.

What you understand of God
was yesterday. Today a bicycle
waits, chained to a bench.

The success of this afternoon's nap
is the dream of lifting seven boxes,
your week, sealed with clear tape.
...Read more

as if opening a crepe sail
on a raft of linden
downriver with no
glacial cut swerve down
soft like bourbon if I could
ask the waters then
to chop to shake
an apology when you cry
I feel a wet bank in me
ring dry here I'll wrap you
in the piano shawl from the upright
to your fists ...Read more

In a circle of 12 winter trees
I'm hunched
Remembering being fled from

-Who gave me this wool sweater?
So it please you life, we won't go alone-
Next year will be better.
Remember that white tree?

The white underpaint of the government.
The country of bone.

-In memory of ...Read more

Alarmed, today is a new dawn,
and that affair recurs daily like clockwork,
undone at dusk, when a new restaurant
emerges in the malnourished night.

We said it would be this way, once this became
the way it was. So in a way we were

waiting for it. I still haven't eaten, says the cook
in the ...Read more

Within the circuit of this plodding life,
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring strews them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievances.
I have remembered when the winter ...Read more