poetry

  It’s what we don’t say that holds us together. In the late afternoon, walking along the Danube we talk about the hills and the color of the water, the street names as foreign and clumsy in our mouths as … Read More

  In the living room my mother can’t sleep. Past midnight, reading a magazine, she eats her way to the bottom of the plate. A swirl of lithium carbonate has thinned into her blood. It’s not enough to make her … Read More

  A fire in the middle of the night, my head whipping back to watch the embers warp the black. A light, neither epiphany nor end. In childhood I’d don a glossy helmet and climb through splintering beams, imagining a … Read More

  for Kyle   You died the day the sparrow flew inside the house. We watched it rise to the high windows, query its wings against the glass clouds. A hundred miles away, propulsion, sunlight— a galvanized scrim, the intersection … Read More

  Each door assigned & your name written above the furl of Batman’s cape & a long hall where cells split & not with grace & another sign reading stay away wash your hands & me whispering of this place … Read More

  …the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. —Marianne Moore   What you first see are the chimney stacks, the moss-covered roofs and then the crosses on top of the gravestones which move up and down … Read More

  Two blackbirds cross the motorway to the east. Gorse like saffron, patching up the side of the hill. Darkest green clusters are of heather, sedge. Brown stains where the water won’t catch. Tall pines crest above the billowing oaks. … Read More

  I walked out beyond the asphalt and the riprap fill behind the beige and gray machine shops, past the brook muscling through growth rife from golf-course effluent and on up to the tall wall around the reservoir, which I … Read More

  Long ago—when measured by a single life— On a typewriter, and owing to the kindness of your Nature, you wrote a letter (from your Brookline Garret’s desk) that traveled, seed-like, Landing on my kitchen table in Ft. Greene where … Read More

  Fragment 1, 5th Century BCE   Horses carry me as far as my longing can reach, transport me to the many-voiced road of the Goddess that carries the one who listens through vast silence. On that way I am … Read More

  In a breath that slips through a tiny door inside the leaves, we talk about the necessity of gravy, as if it’s the vote for higher minimum wage for the long nights of tallying up receipts in the lost … Read More

  A red-tailed hawk in its coat of folded wings perches on the peak of my neighbor’s roof, in its talons the clasped prey, some mammal or other—some pest one should be glad has met its master, though it’s bad … Read More