April 2011
1 post
1 tag
a brief
a brief but furious
a brief and furious moment
when the sound matched the sin.
February 2010
1 post
1 tag
i am thrown two hours to be profound but i spend them waking up. for the last seven days, my windshield has bent mountains. whole canyons, miles of tree lines, snow drifts-pushed into each other, compressed, distorted, discarded by a cruel tectonics of glass, sunlight, drive.
July 2009
2 posts
1 tag
what isn’t is unless less is plenty and time is just yesterday.
1 tag
street, #3
morning light settles on her like pollen. the driveway now empty, the dog lost, the children drawing on the street, the river swelling, swelling up Main, forgetting its place,
until the whole fucking world is delivered.
June 2009
3 posts
1 tag
children, #2
when you were 4, fear no longer kept you from the water’s line. you dug your feet in firmly, as if stepping on a leash. but the ocean would not be beached. it reared, bared its frothy teeth, and broke upon you.
you laughing, laughing.
1 tag
children, #1
when you were 3 the surf shook your ribs. you tried to cover your face in shells. even the ocean’s uterine smell couldn’t shake you from that spell. at night you cried at the sight of the moon being dragged down onto the water and torn apart by waves.
1 tag
river
i plunge my face through that brown skin cold, feral, to look for lost intentions. they float by, just below the corrosive air, compelled by different gravities.
May 2009
20 posts
1 tag
together
the music plays and the rain falls on my hood, white and blistered. whispers, slaps, (sharp, but echoless. think: (cracking knuckles underwater) match the beat of any love song the radio puts up for challenge, and isn’t it rightly so? this hour’s wringing of the clouds, echoes a ringing in the heart. far away, lightening whips the eastern mountains. here, ...
1 tag
right side
and the rain falls white and blistered. whispers, slaps, but echoless. think: of any love song for challenge,
of the clouds, in the heart.
whips
here, the rain, the stretch of a chevy’s roof,
1 tag
left side
the music plays on my hood, (sharp, (cracking knuckles underwater) match the beat the radio puts up and isn’t it rightly so? this hour’s wringing echoes a ringing far away,
lightening, the eastern mountains.
beneath and beneath the music plays.
1 tag
“I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who...”
– Poem 449, Emily Dickinson
1 tag
kitchen #1
fingers cold. he wants to call his father, despite having nothing to say to him. no matter that a slab of granite separates them now.
these urges boil over into his morning, having been poured decades ago, heated by adolescence, alcohol, death.
1 tag
street, #2
at night, with only the highway behind him, massive engines shaking his porch. 78 times he followed the traffic light’s progression before finding his bed. he dreamed nothing, breathed weakly. when he woke the world was still dark, a place where the idea of lines and boundaries had been forgotten.
1 tag
walk
black turtles on logs fat as ticks gorging on the sun
1 tag
street, #1
a stable sense of disquiet. the neighbors friendly enough, though each has noticed the absence of thorns on his rosebushes.
1 tag
it was over rather quickly. faster than the blushing of a leaf slower than its fall- it was over as my receiver cradled, and yours caved in the wall.
1 tag
not one to corner an emotion, he leaves it to tire of its own expression until it is a pile of words, a few theatrical eyebrows, maybe a snarl, or grin, or the corners of one.
1 tag
andalusian love poem, #5
if you want to know, Madrid is just the same without you. here and there, sidewalks crack and the asphalt steams like a river. from the heat down, legs are bared, hair is wet, tightly tied. here and there I eat olives with a toothpick watching slicesof jamon wilt on bread in the unconditioned air. the waitress looks at me from the mirror. I speak to her reflection -I want lemon-water to wash...
1 tag
andalusian love poem, #4
we rise like bread and fall like rivers. i step into rivers daily here. the time that passes between getting wet and reaching the ocean at cadiz: the people here call la precesión. i watch them pass, with drums and bobbing statues. mostly the elderly follow; the youth have itchy asses they scratch with soda straws no one talks of winning but of salvation I cross myself and hope to die if I must...
1 tag
andalusian love poem, #3
stay in these trees with me a bit longer, until the leaves senesce and are lost in flutters to the wind, each by each. if the Everything of orange blossoms speak
as loudly as temptation as brightly as your abdomen, stretched like the strips of linen across the rooftops that shade these thin streets
then i will seek cathedrals and renaissance museums to bore me in your absence.
1 tag
andalusian love poem, #2
always the very moment before the moment after you begin a question with “remember when?” I will consider you coring in the Yukon and me in Plaza de San Francisco in Sevilla with its fiery orange trees, taking a stand, many centuries after the last burning of the inquisition we were separated, our sciences having split us to approximately opposite sides of the globe. your mosquitoes, my flies....
1 tag
andalusian love poem, #1
your absence piles into me: a cotton sheet along my back. in the afternoon I will declare myself lonely (to myself), at night I will sit and write poems to you and re-enact your hair.
1 tag
valley
a grey and purple dust in the air above the valley, which means snow. the dog is particularly drawn to the fringes today, the edges of things: the yard, the stand of pines, my patience.
1 tag
born
the sun over westchester throwsa cool wind into the mouth of a sleeping songbird. a fragile melody lifts over heavy breathing, contraction. your hair tied back, and up. your eyes heavy, darkened by pain. a pear in the making.
1 tag
put a bid on a house,
a farm house, on a land
where cars graze
and cables grow like corn.
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
– “The Burial of the Dead,” from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
1 tag
downshift. shift perspective. perfect deceleration. what we do best in this country is build: homes, careers, and other prisons.
April 2009
1 post
1 tag
i turn on the baby monitor, terrified i will hear my father’s voice upstairs comforting you.
October 2007
3 posts
1 tag
acorns drop like bones. first frost.
1 tag
remember me? remember. remember me? remember me? render me. re-member me. remember me? remember? surrender me to memory, remember not to be so tender in your memory of me, remember not to never see.
1 tag
it isn't
inspired by W. Stafford’s It Is it is not so much the tremulous What as it is the inevitable When that stops my blood. it is bad enough that things happen, but then, when i cut them open and reasons are revealed, beating vigorously, that’s when scars form like knuckles on my face. apologies—i should be more positive, in time my center will be hollow. this is what i’ll work with. i...
June 2007
3 posts
1 tag
newark airport
in the meditation room blue carpet tiles, melamine pulpit rubber baseboard. jesus and his tabernacle in one corner buddha in another. a man rushes in. he is a tall, muscular man, with a marine’s buzzcut. he pauses, finds jesus and genuflects, remembering to remove his hat. his urgency and heavy breathing makes me wonder if he just robbed the Scanalizer kiosk outside, or blew his christian...
1 tag
the palisades in april
the songs are bigger than the birds. eggs warming, redtails spiral my head is on asphalt, but my ears are in the trees.
1 tag
an old city from memory it feels much colder and the people are old, some are sick and taking last steps. even the animals stop caring about night and day, eating. they circle and circle but can’t lie down. they lick their paws, then bite them, tear at the flesh. in this city from my failed memory men in bikinis, ocean water lapping at the curbside
May 2007
2 posts
1 tag
religion
a warm blanket that covers your eyes.
1 tag
spring time in new york
stop to pick the fish hooks from your eyes. stop to smell the poles in subway cars.
April 2007
8 posts
1 tag
the clueless among us say death is only a beginning. they talk clouds and blinding light and happiness. from my pocket, i pull out my father’s tumor, still warm. a thin rivulet of blood slides down my forearm to my elbow, and falls staining the sidewalk. death can be so small, i tell them. and the dead so greedy, robbing your memories while you sleep. every morning a beautiful black...
1 tag
the unexpected blanket hanging off a dead oak. the flood, predicted, left a high water mark at the trunk’s first split, designating the edge of a putrid skin that hangs on the city, drying and cracking. no more music or crime records. no more chocolate.
1 tag
on the farm. six piglets eating shit while my son moos at them
1 tag
in the city again, sitting against the library, the sun is all thumbs, kneading me into the wall.
1 tag
“There will be time,
there will be time
To prepare a face to meet
the faces...”
– T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
1 tag
suburban truths
in the house to the right of mine house the husband’s face is maggotpale and his fingers are his vehicle. he’s 35 and balding and prefers to move by modem or facsimile. last month he accepted the divorce by tapping enter, his wife with two children because he refused them. her left tit points at nine her right one, six. in the house to the left of mine house the woman pricks herself for...
1 tag
the year penelope hoped for a comet she got a flashlight thrown at her by an angry man who had broken into her flat in search of his terracotta frog (which was given to moonlighting as a flute.) he woke her up when he stumbled into the kiddiepool filled with cherry soda that penelope kept in her living room for ‘the bitter days’ she screamed and he sticky and wet threw his...
1 tag
c’mon. tremble for me like a grain of sand in whitewater.
1 tag
the sun in april my eyes. splinters in them.
March 2007
2 posts
1 tag
i remember the day i was born like it never happened and you fill in the details take the color from my face that is still there in the moment before my death and dab it on my chest and see see how the color spreads. here i am again trying to reverse time i was born into, not out of.