poetry

  Solstice dark, four-thirty. Gray rain on the gray cedar shingles, salt box slope. Why do we come home? Dark chocolate Raisinets—long matinee on Scottish monarchs, heavy-handed with the blood and birth. Popcorn sad, diet ice melted. Bitten straw blues: … Read More

  Dry bright. The self’s asymmetry with its surroundings—squirrels deadlifting pinecones heavy with sap. Ponderosa sad. Steak buffet sad. The snakes don’t want to kill you, but will—Erin’s boyfriend calls them danger noodles. I refuse all this glutinous guilt, say … Read More

  Don’t say there is raw fish on the table a boning knife.   The sun is leaving the broken boughs.   With you in the black hole of object consciousness all subjects shrink to nothing.   The heart is … Read More

  There were times we lost track. That’s for sure. One season came with sugar runs for the bees. Another found us coupling at the foot of a mountain like dogs dressed as people. Later, we were almost imitations of … Read More

  No, not a cartoon villain, but the only one left to make champagne fermented in a barrel. Even in California, no one wants to spend the time on such a sparkling wine, which requires bottles rotated to and fro … Read More

  The difference is between seeing and looking. By painting   artificial eyes, I can’t allow people to see, but I can change   how they look. As a child, I owned a retriever with two   different eyes, one … Read More

  Like you, they’d heard the stories. They stood by a founder’s statue in Faculty Glade. Terms— institute, benefit—were tossed at them. Nothing about conquest, or captives. No questions. Attention settled on the slope of the meadow, and when three … Read More

  This spring we planted again, turned the earth and pushed the seeds into the ground with our thumbs just deep enough, then covered them with the compost loam that we had cooked throughout the winter. Then there, buried in … Read More

  I, Your mirror, lie in shards.   When the color left my cheeks, You   left too.

  —after the 1976 Hindi film Laila Majnu   Death is not so cruel.   Does the nightingale not see the bleeding rose, how she tears her collar, her very flesh?   He is mad, she pleads. He is mad. … Read More

  Look! God descends+++ like fog upon the city, +clouding mirror, horizon— +offering little more than the illusion +of dream. ++++The parched ++hold their tongues +++to the air, ++++heavy with water. ++* * * Smash your idols, He says. We … Read More

  —after Faiz   He found in the leaves a mixture of dread and shaking hands. He smiled just once before death.   The lake flowed in the wind like a river and there the skies smelled like Pakistan of … Read More