The little river twittering in the twilight,
The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,
This is almost bliss.

And everything shut up and gone to sleep,
All the troubles and anxieties and pain
Gone under the twilight.

Only the twilight now, and the soft "Sh!" of the river
That will last ...Read more

The sounds of summer leave
your lungs mid-autumn.
Gulls rebuild the sky.
It's more or less a spectacle.
With a gauze of dark circles
under your eyes, you watch
the whole world take a rain check.
The clouds overlap until nightfall
and you twiddle your thumbs
at everyone's mid-life crisis.
...Read more

I'd smoke cigars all day and into the night
while I wrote and wrote without
any hope or slightest assurance
that anything I'd written actually mattered
or rose to a standard of literary merit.
I'd languish in the smoke that did me in
and call it the cloud of my unknowing,
so sweet in its taste, such as ...Read more

Decapitism stuck to the end of my
tongue. What to do but call it names
I thought. It wasn't thought I was
think-
ing I'd have answered had I been
asked, not even thinking I thought...
I sat brooding, tracking a feather's
drop,
plummet my lush regard. I sat
brooding, hen's heat yogic so bent <...Read more

letter to my transgender daughter
I made soup tonight, with cabbage, chard
and thyme picked outside our back door.
For this moment the room is warm and light,
and I can presume you safe somewhere.
I know the night lives inside you. I know grave,
sad errors were made, dividing you, and hiding
you from you...Read more

A map on tissue. A mass of wire. Electricity of the highest order.
Somewhere in this live tangle, scientists discovered-
like shipmates on the suddenly-round earth-
a new catalog of synaptic proteins

presenting how memory is laid down:
At the side of the transmitting neuron

an electrical signal...Read more

The gray path glided before me
Through cool, green shadows;
Little leaves hung in the soft air
Like drowsy moths;
A group of dark trees, gravely conferring,
Made me conscious of the gaucherie of sound;
Farther on, a slim lilac
Drew me down to her on the warm grass.
"How sweet is peace!"
My ...Read more

No wind, no bird. The river flames like brass.
On either side, smitten as with a spell
Of silence, brood the fields. In the deep grass,
Edging the dusty roads, lie as they fell
Handfuls of shriveled leaves from tree and bush.
But 'long the orchard fence and at the gate,
Thrusting their saffron torches through ...Read more

Let us take the river
path near Fall Hill.
There we will negotiate
an outcrop with its silvered
initials & other bits of graffiti,

all the way to the broken edge
that overlooks the bend,
& hold hands until

we can no longer tell
where the river ends.



...Read more

Stony trails of jagged beauty rise
like stretch marks streaking sand-hips.
All the Earth has borne beguiles us
& battered bodies build our acres.

Babes that sleep in hewn rock cradles
learn to bear the hardness coming.
Tough grace forged in tender bones-
may this serve & bless them well.
<...Read more

so much depends
on the authority
of a reality
to guide me

in a logic
of circumstance-

to live comfortably
yet desire differently.


About this poem
"I began this poem by meditating on the well-known line from William Carlos Williams' poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow.' By ...Read more

The words became librarians, custodians of people
I looked for on the bridge.
I forgot my own face.
I read the book backwards, and
I painted your name in lace
(I drink only the milk of script as beer).
I dislocate all gallery aesthetics,
I carry keys for Baltimore and
Go where no one is my name. <...Read more

At least once a week
I walk into the city of bricks
where the rubies grow

and the killers await
the coming of doves and cats.

I pass by the homes of butchers
and their knives sharpened by insomnia

to the river of black sails
and the torn-up sea and the teeth of dogs.

...Read more

I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of faces
with gold glories behind them.


About this poem
"The Sea of Glass" was published in "Lustra of Ezra Pound with Earlier Poems" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1917).

...Read more

I remember
The crackle of the palm trees
Over the mooned white roofs of the town...
The shining town...
And the tender fumbling of the surf
On the sulphur-yellow beaches
As we sat...a little apart...in the close-pressing night.

The moon hung above us like a golden mango,
And the moist air ...Read more

enough seen. enough had. enough
-Arthur Rimbaud
No. It will never be enough. Never
enough wind clamoring in the trees,
sun and shadow handling each leaf, never enough clang
of my neighbor hammering,
the iron nails, relenting wood, sound waves
lapping over rooves, never enough
bees purposeful at the...Read more

Bamboo shoots on my grandmother's side path
grow denser every year they're harvested for nuisance.
Breezes peel blush and white petals from her magnolia,
lacing unruly roots in the spring grass. For nine decades
she has seen every season stretch out of shape, this past
Connecticut winter slow to relinquish cold. As ...Read more

It continued to haunt, in its electro-stripes and
late your saying intervened, adding blue
to the triangle like a screen. This
system which couldn't echo and failed to
orient the true barrier. A long thin line
from their penultimate year
or the pavilion they're casting around.



About ...Read more

She's in the desert
releasing the ashes of her father,
the ashes of her child,
or the ashes of the world. She is not

what she observes. The rare spinystar.
It does not belong to her. Bright needle threading
a cloud through the sky. There's sun enough,
there's afterlife. Her own body, a pillar of ...Read more

I bypassed all the compromise,
The first ten problems of speech
And the latest, the sharpest, the contest,
Then began, having already fallen,
To rise just less, weaker than
My chore, yours, made else
By othering, by day by day,
The schedules, the routes, task
Whose claim I forgot to throw off,
...Read more