The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm's shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live ...Read more

And I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,-
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father's fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.
Look, ...Read more

More than a hundred dollars of them.
It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in.
Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner

of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table-

each fresh-faced, extending its delicately veined leaves

into ...Read more

Just want things
proportional.
Just things,
not all.

Not kings, kings
should be below:

shoveling, dripping,
and most of all-

literally speaking-
not people

nothing living
need be within our ratio.

I underexaggerate,
though:

...Read more

In the recesses of the woman's mind
there is a warehouse. The warehouse
is covered with wisteria. The wisteria wonders

what it is doing in the mind of the woman.
The woman wonders too.
The river is raw tonight. The river is a calling

aching with want. The woman walks towards it
her arms ...Read more

You insist
that the world belongs to a stony-hearted goat-god-
how every time we act, we enact
his vileness; how this is no
ecstasy, just a bad labored joke.

Your body in spasm
longs to strip the flesh, but if you do
there will be nothing left but the busy
bone-clatter of tactics.

...Read more

An extra day-
Like the painting's fifth cow,
who looks out directly,
straight toward you,
from inside her black and white spots.

An extra day-

Accidental, surely:
the made calendar stumbling over the real
as a drunk trips over a threshold
too low to see.

An extra ...Read more

Dark, and the wind-blurred pines,
With a glimmer of light between.
Then I, entombed for an hourless night
With the world of things unseen.

Mist, the dust of flowers,
Leagues, heavy with promise of snow,
And a beckoning road 'twixt vale and hill,
With the lure that all must know.

A ...Read more

O white little lights at Carney's Point,
You shine so clear o'er the Delaware;
When the moon rides high in the silver sky,
Then you gleam, white gems on the Delaware.
Diamond circlet on a full white throat,
You laugh your rays on a questioning boat;
Is it peace you dream in your flashing gleam,
O'er the ...Read more

You only watch the news to find out
where the fires are burning, which way
the wind is blowing, and whether
it will rain. Forecast ahead but first:
A mother's boy laid out
in the street for hours.
These facts don't wash away.


About this poem
"This poem was inspired by the death of ...Read more

It's love you left, we'll say
when you never come back
for bells for the dead, for the grave
stone heads: the only ones
that don't keep count. Don't
we know it's love that keeps you
away, that marks every mile
devotion? You would've went
to the end with each one,
made Orpheus turn back.
...Read more

When it happens the rain
is not black but powder.
A noise bleeds from your ears
and everything quakes

alive inside you:
the circuits of the flowers

lighting up across a meadow,
the nanoglow

of a sea years from here
-:And like the flash

across an event horizon...Read more

I could play the accordion
so I was selected for the amateur propaganda team.
It was very cold. I had to stop up the hole in my shoe.
I used the lid of a tin can.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing
trustworthy about my experience of reality.
I stand on one leg. I stand on the other leg.
I ...Read more

Not hers but mine. Not hers ever again. Ever
hers, my body pulled through, two
long windows open in the dark of birth,
the gold cord raised too in its wake. Awake,
the first morning. The first morning & all,
all the windows were closed inside. A blindness
scalding broken sight. The silence pulled through
...Read more

I dreamed that I was a rose
That grew beside a lonely way,
Close by a path none ever chose,
And there I lingered day by day.
Beneath the sunshine and the show'r
I grew and waited there apart,
Gathering perfume hour by hour,
And storing it within my heart,
Yet, never knew,
Just why I waited ...Read more

So much have I forgotten in ten years,
So much in ten brief years; I have forgot
What time the purple apples come to juice
And what month brings the shy forget-me-not;
Forgotten is the special, startling season
Of some beloved tree's flowering and fruiting,
What time of year the ground doves brown the fields <...Read more

What secret had Nietzsche discovered
when he walked the Turin streets
before he flung his arms around
a horse being beaten and collapsed
into a decade-long coma? Clinging
to the cowering brown beast, he said
Mother, I am stupid. Wild hair and a three-
piece tweed suit constrained the body
that held...Read more

after Anthony Haughey's "Settlement"
Garden of rock.
Garden of brick and heather.
Garden of cranes with their hands raised
as if they know the yellow answer:
to gather together-safety in numbers.
Garden of drywall frames, holes for windows
punched out like teeth. Garden of bar fights.
Garden of ...Read more

Ours is a partial language part pantomime,
part grimy guesswork: adulterated speculation
as to meaning & motivation.

Translated, heart suggests a familiar, universal
device but internal chemistries vary-
though components be the same & not uncommon.

The world owes us nothing. It promises less. <...Read more