Outside my window it's never the same-
some mornings jasmine slaps the house, some mornings sorrow.
There is a word I overheard today, meaning lost
not on a career path or across a floating bridge:

Boketto-to stare out windows without purpose.
Don't laugh; it's been too long since we leaned

into ...Read more

It is a cube, it is red, it is mountainous,
it is a bird of fire, it is the bones of the pelvis, it is a walnut,
it is treasured. It is yellow Saturn wobbling in its orbit.
It is danger, squawking.

It is the desire to sit down with strangers in cafes
and then it is the strangers in cafes,
it is the man ...Read more

The man said I could see them if I wanted
He said America would never be
A place where we could live together not at

Least in my lifetime but the damned don't see

No important differences between the Ne-

gro and the White the damned don't see no bad

In folks ...Read more

What use in you you wrong wrought wood
what bevel escaped its key. A mandible
beyond its prey an arrow all shaft in each
one its torso oddly pierced and tails that spring
like thistle weed a root that wears a vacant stay
and tacky to the touch its itch to form a place
gone red with west and who will ride your ...Read more

Prince Rogers Nelson, 1958-2016

"Adore" was my song
Back in '87-
Cool beans, I liked to say,
Desperately uncool.
Except for you.
Florida, a dirty hand
Gesture; the state, pay dirt.
Headphones on, I heard,
In a word, you were sex,
Just in time. Who was I
Kidding? Then, as ...Read more

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.

From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful ...Read more

And now she walks on out turned feet
Beside the litter in the street
Or rolls beneath a dirty sheet
Within the town.
She does not stir to doff her dress,
She does not kneel low to confess,
A little conscience, no distress
And settles down.

Ah God! she settles down we say;
It means her ...Read more

for Arctic Explorer Donald B. MacMillan
Provincetown, September
All summer, town kids pose at the edge
of the pier named after you

and leap. I've just flown home from Baffin,
Mac. A month of spotting polar bears,

lecturing on tundra as raw wind shrugged us off,
then winter chased us down ...Read more

Attention fraying
in late afternoon light, soon
day will be done, not

the work incumbent on it
-whatever that might have been-

Gnarls of an old text
in the other alphabet:
can I unknot them,

reweave mirror fabric of
liminal unravelings?

*

Liminal...Read more

substituting one day for the next remaining attempt to emerge from the next gesture skip deity made entirely of language, to the next instant justification graveyard, like content, like everything else, like a given epic, like another battle dream beach distance, another metaphor without preemptive assumptions.
we are through and the ...Read more

In this life,
I was very minor.
I was a minor lover.
There was maybe a day, a night
or two, when I was on.

I was, would have been,
a minor daughter,
had my parents lived.

I was a minor runner. I was
a minor thinker. In the middle
distance, not too fast.

I was ...Read more

You wouldn't know it could feel so redundant-
the wolfish starlings plunder the grass
and nothing burns. Big Sur. We came here to rest.
The coast, a color. The thought of nothing,
the blue middle of my life-
A cliff side and a footpath
down to the small beach. And fire, there
a cold wind. Long waves the ...Read more

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.-You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I ...Read more

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring.
The sky-lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells' cheerful sound.
While our sports shall be seen
On the Ecchoing Green.

Old John, with white hair
Does ...Read more

I had put down in writing my fear of the war
I too pined for pastoral description
The blue of the water was the blue of the world

Newness does not, for me, equal satisfaction

A finite number of concentric rings I push out into space

A tedious fabric moving through time without malice

...Read more

Stein asked what is the difference. She did not ask what is the sameness. Did not ask what like is. Or proximity. Resemblance. Did not ask what child of what patriarch what height what depth didn't use a question mark but still wondered at the difference what mutinies it carries over what vast Arctic what far shore.
What is the difference ...Read more

I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free
I wish I could break
All the chains holding me -Nina Simone

today i am a black woman in america
& i am singing a melody ridden lullaby
it sounds like:
the gentrification of a brooklyn stoop
the rent raised three times my wages
the bodega and ...Read more

We went
to watch the hawks
glow their side
of the enclosure

eyes wet from
looking, afterwards

in the museum
park I watched Lou

rub the lit
cigarette into her arm

sun spilling over
her face, knowing

she was blind
to me sometimes
...Read more

Ultimately the air / Is bare sunlight where must be found /
The lyric valuables-George Oppen
A few surprising turns follow us everywhere.
I was shopping for something to replace
what I once felt. Weren't there buildings there
where we once lived, fully furnished
and looking out on the sea? Didn't we distill <...Read more

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,-
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?


About this poem
"To the Moon [fragment]" was published in "...Read more