Because you like to sleep with curtains drawn,
at dawn I rose and pulled the velvet tight.
You stirred, then set your hand back on my hip,
the bed a ship in sleep's doubled plunging

wave on wave, until as though a lighthouse
beam had crossed the room: the vase between

the windows suddenly ablaze,...Read more

A man can cry, all night, your back
shaking against me as your mother
sleeps, hooked to the drip
to clear her kidneys from their muck
of sleeping pills. Each one white
as the snapper's belly I once watched a man
gut by the ice bins in his truck, its last
bubbling grunt cleaved in two
with a knife. ...Read more

Reedy striations don't occlude the beneath-
earthy mash of leaves, flat pepper flakes, layered,
tips protruding, tender-desolate above a mirror
surface, gently pressing on horse-mane, nest material,

tickle-brush, fringe. Buff block-shapes further down,
ghost-bits of green-green, a lone leaf burned white.
...Read more

With pollen of the white stars on thy wings,
Oh! would I shared thy flight, thy fantasy,
The aimless beauty of thy brightenings!
A worker, wed to Purpose and Things,
Earth-worn I turn from Day's sufficiency.
One lethed hour that duty never brings,
Oh! one dim hour to drift, Moth Moon, with thee!

...Read more

The subtlest strain a great musician weaves,
Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony
To music in his soul. May it not be
Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves
That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves
Unheard in the transition. Thus do we
Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty
Of some rare mood, ...Read more

the sun drops his knee on fog
a diurnal genuflection that
explains the lack of clarity in the prayer's thought

when god prays to himself

using the fog's opaque cushion

we know god is a child

who pretends to pray

because in the midst of his holy make-believe childhood <...Read more

I would have liked then for someone to touch me
So I could know the purpose of this hardship.
Black-eyed and impassive as a canyon,
From the hive of my mind, I looked at their faces
As I moved between rows of espaliered pears.
I only intended for someone to show
Me, once, an affection like the sun
Shows ...Read more

I'm a witch who lost all her powers, then
in place of my powers, I got the coiled beauty
of seashells and sleeping infants. The coiled
beauty of eardrums, and the sound wave
of bells. The bells! This is the country of clouds.
The molten body, the Floridian pinks,
and centuries of sand dollars examining
...Read more

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.
Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn't be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn't require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they ...Read more

I wake, doubt, beside you,
like a curtain half-open.
I dress doubting,
like a cup
undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,
work doubting,
go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,
as a herd of goats
sleep in a suddenly gone-...Read more

You have spoken the answer.
A child searches far sometimes
Into the red dust
On a dark rose leaf
And so you have gone far
For the answer is:
Silence.

In the republic
Of the winking stars
and spent cataclysms
Sure we are it is off there the answer is hidden and folded over,
...Read more

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.



...Read more

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what's
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal...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

I will drift
into darkness
and know it

perhaps

the way a son

recognizes a mother

after he has returned

from many years

of travel

understanding

the new distance

is neither

beginning nor

end
...Read more

extract longing.
fold its edges
in gold paper
to rest on a scale.


the catapult of one
plate plummets
the other swings
bobs and waits
for a leaf of one's
want to waft down.


such gentle collisions
crush more than steel
crack more than bones upon ...Read more

When she stretched her arms
the mist lifted and the red buds opened on the maple trees.
She, in the garden in pajamas,
danced with her friend Isabel,
as the fledgling robins wobbled and flew from branch to ground.
Cells multiplied in her body.
Her fingers spread, the warm cool air,
as the mist ...Read more

Each year I mark one lone outstanding tree,
Clad in its robings of the summer past,
Dry, wan, and shivering in the wintry blast.
It will not pay the season's rightful fee,-
It will not set its frost-burnt leafage free;
But like some palsied miser all aghast,
Who hoards his sordid treasure to the last,
It...Read more

The sun has sunk below the level plain,
And yet above the forest's leafy gloom
The glory of the evening lightens still.
Smooth as a mirror is the river's face
With Heaven's light, and all its radiant clouds
And shadows which against the river's shore
Already are as night. From some retreat
Obscure and ...Read more

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows;-
The happy days unclouded to their close;
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
Like swallows ...Read more