Category: poems

  • from The Lost Weekend
    after Sherrie Levine

    A Glass of Water at Hand A secure flap drags a flag —                       spoiled oil rolled over into a tarp —                                       decamped tent — back to the State of Umbrellas —                           morpheme drips sealing in the sovereign —                                            apostrophe S — where the downpours pelt everything but —                                   filled-in erasers […]

  • Just beneath & All around Them

    Limbs sieve sky’s blot. Needles thread the light thin. Day crushed into & out of itself.

  • Closer to Always Under

    Time thrives out of light taking root in the space around leaves.

  • On the Poetics of Possibility in Robert Lowell

    When I first got word of the publication of Robert Lowell’s collected poems, I was exuberant. I yelled, “Finally!” Having been force-fed Lowell in college, with great resistance; I confess an obsession with his work eventually developed. Alternately dismissing his work, then running towards it – my resistance dropped with Derek Walcott‘s publication of “On […]

  • “this week mistook your watching yourself for coyness…”

    this week mistook your watching yourself for coyness      last night confinement looked like the way you might have before wiped off my stomach with a towel it’s peculiar enough to make me think of your mouth as a cow get its throat cut on a movie screen for which you will not forgive me with […]

  • A Parable   (for Jakob Stein)

    He put the poem on the altar (the blonde spelled it “alter”) but the God would have none of it The God then reminded him that the altar was out of date as was noted in the scroll He gave the poem to the blonde and the poem began to change as was noted in […]

  • A LIGHT

        a light enters the body falls into shadow         a line    in the grass      under shade           a movement brown ants           wind —              acres of it — dry fields       heat gusts muscles ache a day’s walk a clearing’s clear shapes       sun  seeks  deep hollows runs […]

  • Crows

    On Monday I awoke to the koan of a rifle: the sound of one hand cracking its knuckles. In retreat, their wings make a noise too like applause. Their cries of alarm? Dependable.           In the stony paddock, three Palominos bend to the stubble, oblivious to the corpse ladder-high in the roost, the silhouette is part […]

  • In His Image

    Look at what he looks like, finds In looking                                                                      refracts, The pure image broken. The self, at a depth past depth for seeing,                                                                                            clearly At the further distance appears An amnios, a cosmos of                                                         darker matter: Velleity as veil, as trans-parental. To be, as being                                  concealed. In the cloaked infernals, heated alembics Of gravity’s curves […]