phase out the draft begin with the particle in it I rose a million ashes in an impromptu halo

the whole while snow puts to bed differences in landscape friction in the hiss raises forests and lays flat the field to the ear’s extent –             • a puddle in the dark impossible to miss because of pissing rain             • a sound like white noise rustle or friction in the snow screen drapes over the […]

i. Distant shit and wet moss laced through what winter’s left: radiated rain, warped window sill, wind-seething eucalyptus. ii. Ocean-shoved cumulus cloud incises horizon held by hills and radio towers’ red volleyed lights. iii. As if to pin a thought to the back of my skull     a humming- bird pivots, glares through me — its […]

Coils in a silo in cavernous open space downward sloping lined with aluminum panels crosshatched with grids; a hum. A droning range. Tuned to the key of E. And a glare of light. Intensifying a holy living form in the nave of the silo. No secret for the poet-priests. What is it? Wondrous. Wall of […]

in pain, I don’t experience pain as repetition though I’ve knelt into nausea this way before and bent, reminiscent of prayer or surrender like looking again at Agnes Martin’s The Beach the texture of a tissue protecting an engraving pain touches the mind with a similar distance entirely prepositional, dependent on proximity an order bordering […]

white unrented room before I write the poem it’s a wall or its image projected    wavering it remains distant when thinking enters the image as sound a gorgeous torching where my eye was I put my ear to see the current burn in the poem open filament trembling wattage for Peter O’Leary

I look at paintings                                                     I work on another poem Agnes Martin made                                                     with a ruler and pencil and I think about                                                     compulsory repetition the grid as endgame                                                     helpless entrapment not a spiritual practice                                                     or meditative lyric but the mind’s limit                                                     iterated constantly I know she believed                                                     satisfaction impossible art is better hungry                                                     but I remember […]

A stretched head with Formidable jaws, A series of ribs forming A large ovoid body and The vestiges of flippers Arranged in undulating shape, One hundred fourteen feet in length, Those bones Dr. Koch Displayed in the Apollo Saloon, Broadway 1845, Hydragos Sillimanii, or Silliman’s master-of-the-seas, Its head raised into position — “Dr. Koch, this […]

From space, a ragged scar. Someone’s named it beautiful — Most Beautiful — and its history’s clear, though the picture’s distant. Five hundred miles away, the moon is a hatchet of silver, prepared to slip into whatever earth needs cutting. Five hundred miles away, the stars are locked in dark, are breaking with us as […]