Category: poems

  • The Heron (in Just-Spring)

    Meaty forays, tangled forums felt in the blue, felt along the white. Native born in edible spring a pattern is real. ** Monadnock and Rookery. The rustle in the grass is just the wind. I invented nostalgia. A pattern is real. ** The balloon man turns an oyster into a twisted heron. An agent is […]

  • After Clarence Ashley

    Above the drone the thumb string drones a cabinet clock

  • At Paradise Bay

    The service did not bring us To our knees with gratitude. Still we stayed in Paradise, Awash in the sun of a perfect day, In the angelic choir of seabirds, In the congregation of sailboats, Baptized in love, Salvation in our own intimate heaven.

  • Horses of Insight   (for Peter O’Leary)

    I walked the woods after breathing quietly and seeing everything dissolve… Four times I saw the horses: one black stallion, with a lightning bolt of white streaking down its forehead, and two brown mares. Each day I sang to them and showed them each of my hands. The first day all of them came to […]

  • Dethroned

    Possessions and scarecrow stand in noon-gone.               Voice! stand in noon-gone.               Conflicted King, once a beggar followed in markets by a Nubian goat, flockless, flightless — One lugnut goat. In the birth drawers,               blazes of bandicoots. And now, coming in threes by a flute of feathers, their tails               shades of peeled citrus. I am dinner in […]

  • From Animals Badly Raised

    I, Catastrophe, from the white tails inside slab cities, confront a committee of all my years past, govern the wild fowl until her wind takes my voice               and away with it runs   I, Misbegotten, don’t have               what I don’t know. Maybe someone sings from plucked rooster strings a morning cast in broken bottles — […]

  • To Be Invisible

    I admit little deaths. City lung-shards                                      pulp cigarettes. Dust, zero aperture. So the causeway imitates                                      the dial of weathervanes My caws’ red-combed sweeping. Eyes as the reason                                     we can’t see, I toss the seed into the river. As if a penny can turn itself.                                      In a palm, gleaming. I become an albeit. […]

  • Covert Velvet

    spill brief in don’t a cardhouse shuffle candles lately hands over so it’s official ambassador’s eyelet wilts the steady in array wrapped in whir of vertigo’s covert velvet preps an outwards spark of keepsake kept klepto will weigh

  • Odes 3.17
    Horace

    Aelius, from ancient Lamus as those elder Lamiae   read the family lineage       in the social register. The line’s founder they say held Formiae’s walls   and Marica’s shore where       the River Liris swims — broad dominion. Tomorrow leaves will litter the grove,   seaweed the beach, unless       the crow — rain’s augur — deceives. Gather dry wood […]