poetry

  Santa Fe, 2018   walked down that street past our casita the place we’d stayed our bedroom window past the Cathedral the Christmas music our last Christmas the deep mid-winter and into the plaza the plaza lights on your … Read More

  What is there— other than the bear hold—held up in cold nights as example, other than the body of bears, waiting in caves— the opposite of caving in. Nakedness is what we bear and the cloak and dagger of … Read More

  for Gloria Emerson We were sitting on the back porch when the news came on the radio: Saddam’s tanks racing across the desert into Kuwait. “That’s it,” she said, rising from her chair, flinging her enormous arms to the … Read More

  For a long time I wanted to drink a cup of winter, to become tipsy on early dark & longer starshine. The thinning light my favorite ether. These days I am uncertain, dead reckoning my way through— surrendering to … Read More

  We could use some new memories to replace permanent shadows left by people when that next morning the sun rose in Japan as if nothing untoward was happening down here— or a heart transplant to harbor compassion and ward … Read More

  There’s nothing more now but vacant bodies, the equations of being buried. I turn around: everyone is up to their shoulders in sand, they strain to turn their heads, and yet they clamor. Every cry is an alarm set … Read More

  I had this ridiculous pang of nostalgia for Italian bureaucracy so I got a cheap flight to Genoa and then a taxi to the Municipal Hall in Corso Torino where, with satisfaction, I joined a queue, a long queue. … Read More

  You will never know what he thinks about while he runs, as music muffles the city’s roar of evening, yawn of morning. As he smells burnt leaves in autumn, spring petrichor, the river in summer. You cannot imagine the … Read More

  Pink Blossom Born in full bloom I grew along the feminine arc— pink diminishment & pink despair pinched back & pedestaled thin into air but even the invisible could see no man no thing lived resolute as me.   … Read More

  For three weeks the fridge has been whining like a dog. It must be the freezer fan, or the compressor: either way, it’s screwed. I have three months left to live in this country. No job, no old home … Read More

    5. The door of the big red shed hides nothing, And this isn’t because the shed is empty. In the season of fertility dugites hibernating, The door of the big red shed hides nothing And then splendid fairy … Read More