poetry

  After surviving the fanfold and admiring your oblique body, don’t be surprised   when a chain of perfect strangers unfurl themselves from the raw material of you and hold your hand. It’s normal to be anxious   but if … Read More

  for Michael New (1942-2006)   You would have liked it here: in a small city along a river, with the spires of a Gothic cathedral looming above a castle and the burgher descendants of the margraves who raised the … Read More

  Wasps on the windowsill, and a bolt of silk Unfurling from the carriage torched at the edge Of the last city lost to the insurgents, And a horse neighing on the bank of the river That ran dry long … Read More

—in memory of Mahmoud Darwish He hears a neighbor’s charged with treason. The coffee’s cold and the French bread stale. Flies cling to a ramekin of apricot jam. The muezzin, a fig for another day.   In his dreams he … Read More

  Note the pseudopupils, the caption suggests—size varying from a pencil eraser fleck to an ant’s foreleg, pinpricks in the blue foveal band indiscernible to the untrained eye, nuclei-less whorl of locust grain on a dollhouse door   from which … Read More

  The pink lily petals are dried and pressed. They mark pages along with receipts and post cards. The parts we want to remember. You say death does away with time—the pages between where we start and stop reading tear … Read More

  I don’t want anyone to fuss over me when I’m dead— just throw my body on a tarp, drag me into an open field, pile pine & balsa wood around me, spell my name with butane, & light me … Read More

Small creature running through the burning grass, you will be of use. In the old language, there was nothing but simple words, (mousescratch, mousesniff) yet everything was accounted for. Your body has survived the lightning, and runs now— a word— … Read More

  Christopher Smart knelt on these floors. He praised winter, he wrote Geoffrey on the walls. He shouted   I’m barefoot. I lost my rosary.   Praying in Bedlam used to be easy for the dead.   He stood. The … Read More

  In Mr. Rodriguez’ high school World History class, a lecture about the crushing stress on ordinary citizens—through poor harvests, through taxes on the very salt and wheat needed for bread, through limiting their right to work a trade—takes his … Read More

  We weren’t anywhere we weren’t nearby When she gave a shriek My friend had taken a bullet And was now walking the bullet around in his back   He’d reached the Scala Cinema And had gone as far with … Read More

  He will be a beggar–– no, a barber!   And he will polish your nails each time you lay down your pen   even though hair is his only métier.   And he will practice the close measure of … Read More