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Drain
an eyelash in an otherwise white sink
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I Put Some Childish Things Away
Peter was there, too, when I screamed about the gobs of the modern to my eighth graders. Peter listened with my students and accepted candy. He was Saul, the first king, to me, not the persecutor. I want to play chess with Timothy. I don’t care what anyone tells me. That religion which would have […]
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Living through a Fatal Crash for George
this is the first of many questions ‘the narrow frightening light, before a sunrise’ that moving across California New York, Mexico, we can trace a politic of revision choices made while young – the directions – given or sought out in distress, as a condition remain words in a series, a method responding to memory […]
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Occasional
Another endless American winter in which I rarely bleed. (A blue broom accrues dust in the corner. An elevator levels with the floor.) As if the ocean weren’t a place from which you carefully needle me.
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The Phosphorescence of Thought {The Bone Yard, for Jeff Clark}
Eleuthera. January. Bahamian berries sweeten slowly over the winter season but March is arid & the berries grow scarce. The island’s scrub secretes afflicted woodland warblers whose rapid wintering movements researchers track in twenty-one day stretches accomplished by tiny radio transmitters a half-gram heavy one angel-hair wisp of antenna extends from held to the body […]
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The Architect
1. beloved of the page balsam juniper those that appear as crucial, rudimentary reasons for tapping the surface of water utterance a barren geometry where each is a beginning in design the draft drawn-blue remnants of music self-imposed […]
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Cadre (to ASCAP)
It’s hardly a noble science, para- science: lunar nodes and portents of events, when the crackpots and charlatans count sidereal time and turn lead into gold. It’s a traditional know-how like art, acquired by habit or traditional rules, of which composers compose the nomenclature of the planets in any order: saturnine, lunatic, martial, jovial: small […]
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The world does not stop for flowers
By itself it moves itself. When it rains it rains. The dead air of my officed brain’s a space too small for joy.
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All the Dead Pat Their Glands When We Fall Down
The boy who towed fishing boat to campsite through waist-deep water studied astronomy but became a teacher at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Harlem. One morning he found a rat dead a few feet from the school’s front steps. He continues to lack the company of sympathetic chess partners. Tonight I have the dream where […]