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To the Brown Thrasher
Weft over warp, twill seams a route to and onward. Listen! He stops and starts in thicket, fairly high, in and out, to a couplet of elderberries across her chest, maybe; my sense isn’t what it was. But even his song smears over stops and starts as a reminder: territory wasn’t marked, land- locked, but […]
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The Phosphorescence of Thought
Three splendidly lemoning magnolia warblers uplifting through a maple tree.
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A Fitful Beginning: On Philip Jenks’s The Elms Left Elm Street
The Elms Left Elm Street , by Philip Jenks. Plane Buckt Press, Takoma Park Maryland, 1994. On the subject of Philip Jenks, an email correspondent recently wrote me this: “I sometimes divide the world into people who love Phil’s work & people who don’t,” adding that this division is “a narrow but helpful measure.” […]
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across the rabid sky
1. after your exit the rustling night stirs 2. blue wood in my mouth the empty chair and the table unset pasted frequency withers on my wall my hands wipe circles off the dying in my room i exchange vapor for your unfed voice
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After Marcel Duchamp
Painting’s washed up. Who’ll do better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?
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The Phosphorescence of Thought
Flocked starlings’ geometric detonations inspired like fireworks.
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May
Threat level orange town brides leave their whites hanged from fence barbs. For everyone to see at night a rarely used beam on a cantilever, deer carved on a vase.
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Augury
I. There again, sweat in the throat, bitter buttons fastened, tongue soaked, lambently new. The body’s disbelief — yaw of gait, delicate tango — a withered pulp perceptible. Marrow dark, acidic. Curette automatic as breath. You begin to disintegrate while dancing. The music like mold. II. Sorrow song, the single crow circles west, whip […]
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Stirred
We mimicked the cypress, our knees cropped above the high, sunk-dry prairie, our heels hardpulled into our tails. He’d turn stories, aphetic for histories, genteel and curt: the Trail of Tears and the swampland of the Southeast as sure as succession, significant as skin, hide and bark.