poetry

  This train stop at Liberty Airport used to be fields, now folks rush into the city, going home or away to a new beginning. I find myself checking for grips & horn cases, musicians coming in for cutting contests … Read More

  There are days of no poems. Not even 17 sounds will come. Why is Joan Didion walking congo baby tiger in my dream? Frog in the pond. Scoop her out, and drive her to the stream. Lay your eggs … Read More

  During life I wanted to be buried in a mystery. On a western estuary where seabirds nest. To drop into a piece of muck and shell, unnamed. Wind, low clouds, rain and shafts of sun. Monks, poets, vapors of … Read More

  Dwarf plants, brittle green, A premature llama, a white giraffe Splashed clean, a pouter pigeon With an inflatable crop. These are the limit of my estate. The first pouter came out as a double-tail, Made from the ancient rock … Read More

  I hold my life with two hands. I walk with two legs. Two ears are enough to hear Bach with. Blinded in one eye, a person sees with the other. Now a great darkness is coming. A both-eyes darkness. … Read More

  Night, the street, the lamp, the drugstore, An empty and toothless light. Live another twenty years more— There’s no way out. No use to fight. You die; rebirth is so banal. And everything repeats its weary stamp: Night, the … Read More

  Standing here at the kitchen sink washing the breakfast dishes, I can see this favorite yellow coffee cup of mine, brought back from Italy ten years ago, will break some day, if not right now, slipping from my suddenly … Read More

  A saturated past his nod, that untaught, I’d known sacred slant and tilt, in silence, spoke a red blaze to the green man, unmoving and dark as a forest pool. My goat muzzle, red-lined against his unsaid words each … Read More

  Here is my first offering, love: The first time I flew over the Citadelle (The clouds above it shifting to bare its vast self: Fortress meant to keep the French from ever, If not forever, in this part of … Read More

  Saint Augustine preached humility & the need to simply be on the ground. Do you wish to rise? he asked. What would he say of these words then, which, after all, are meant to replace us? What would he … Read More

  —Charlottesville, VA   I am sitting in a station built in the Depression, an island in a scrap drive sea. Now they’ve converted, serve fire-roasted vegetables, plates of bread. In the thirties, home to hobos, Ford-mint autos, kids play … Read More

  In the beginning was nothing, nothing orthodox, nothing unorthodox. Only the pure point of utterness out of which are all things disposed. Still—from the mountain-top you could see all things: south, the island villages, the fields and wildscapes, teeming … Read More