A chilly light pervades the empty room
bringing neither its current nor former inhabitant peace.
Rather, its immaterial lingering infests
both the air inside and what we see of the grass
outside-brittle, brown, as if it wanted to avoid the sun.
Inside, the visitor must be respectful
and polite, evasive without...Read more

I found it on your belly, and caught it
with two fingers. I kept the bird
on a little perch behind my ear.

I plucked its feathers, stuffed them
against my jaw like chewing tobacco,
and spit the black threads

into a styrofoam cup. One night
the bird died. Crushed beak, split
bone-we ...Read more

not a real one
a painting
a monarch
one more sign
for anguish
poured and
poured a choice to feel or
stack bricks between
I was sad when my
talented friend started designing
television commercials
he told me to grow up
but the rocks in the desert I touch
...Read more

Once, I wanted to be Hemingway.
But so did Hemingway. That act is hard-
dumb facts decked out as art, and anyway,
who gets what they want? And then who cares?
What matters when the water at your feet
is running out without you? I grew my beard
and bought a little boat on credit, named
it after myself and...Read more

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes
To pace the ground, if path be there or none,
While a fair region round the traveller lies
Which he forbears again to look upon;
Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene,
The work of Fancy, or some happy tone
Of meditation, slipping in between
The beauty coming and ...Read more

The rabbit has stolen
The big bear's pointy red hat.
The frog looks longingly
At its evaporating pond.

A powerful glow comes
Off the sunflower

So everyone wears goggles.
My son rolls around in the ferns.

It seems he has overdosed
On sugar cookies.

Does he ...Read more

Untying ropes from flagpoles.
Motionless, reluctant, unchanged
even by the stillness of flags

in a century of ordinary flags. How

I love to ride with my brother

even if below our joy persists

a collective hush and something

like Lake Michigan in which we know

...Read more

Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction?
-William Blake
Won't come alive ever yet or again? In the mind of Endtime it looks like this: shell, volute, Tabriz, eddies, and tides. Flowers wilt. When you wake, observe the unmitigated trials and tribulations of these tossed things, random it seems. But in the endtime, less ...Read more

I threw out everything that didn't give me a spark
and hung all the whites on the table.
Greens and deep dirt browns and grays.

The sensory titillations of the day

entered each limb's phantom collapse and gait, tremor are you there?

See until you are gone and there is only what you are seeing. <...Read more

It was a nearly perfect morning-bucolic, pastoral-
so I found myself cataloguing my past humiliations.
Really, there was no reason for it! I might as well have
looked for an ant hill to lie down on in a meadow
of goldenrod. I can't explain it but perhaps I thought
that with the rising sun as my witness, with the ...Read more

It's shivering
Like a little lady rattling her bell
Calling for tea
Quivering in the old style

There's a red light in Boston
At the close of day
Like the red light of idiocy
All along the bricks
Of Harvard Yard & a blue
Sky so hard & irradiated
In the way of old cinema
...Read more

I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic spright,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My worlds both parts, and oh! both parts must die.
You, which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I ...Read more

When the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon
Thrown through my window,
I know that hours of light
Are about to thrust themselves into me
Like omnivorous needles into listless cloth,
Threaded with the heavy colours of the sun.
They seem altogether too eager,
To embroider this thing of mine,
My Day, <...Read more

That we can breathe and not forget
our dreams entirely. In the cold sun
the warmth of timelessness. There is
panic, rest assured, so much beauty

stirring, I want to touch all that
contains me. We know the questions

and the light shifts without a word.
In the clouds, a philosopher's chair <...Read more

(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day)
I remember here by the fire,
In the flickering reds and saffrons,
They came in a ramshackle tub,
Pilgrims in tall hats,
Pilgrims of iron jaws,
Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,
And the random chapters say
They were glad and sang to God.
...Read more

Tell me the world. Here comes light, unspoken.
Light hooks a claw on the horizon, pulls itself
into view. Here comes water, saline,
scattering single-celled organisms.
Land is a puppet. It climbs hydrothermal vents like stairs.
Lava congeals. Land rises. Here comes land,
hand-springing out of water. Wind is a ...Read more

Who hasn't been tempted by the sharp edge of a knife?
An ordinary knife cutting ordinary tomatoes on
an ordinary slab of wood on an ordinary Wednesday.
The knife nicks, like a bite to the soul. A reminder
that what is contemplated is as real as the blood
sprouting from a finger. As real as a bruised eye.
...Read more

My first burnt bark child-flung to the windless flames
Second sly child-dressed for weather, swan skinned
Serpents impress diamonds into my salt shoulders
This composed with the Devil's black forked feet

He wants them back, sunk in hot white ink
Tentacles; mother-hunger hundred-mouths; the drift and night-...Read more

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and ...Read more

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?
At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse?
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?
And loved so well a high behavior,
In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,
Nobility more nobly to repay?
O, be my ...Read more