writing on the bruised
body and seeing into the
bruise's locked backyard, not
psychoanalyzing the incursion
but appreciating its scissory
up and down

_________


remembering the wish
to be Anais Nin-

_________


stepping on the old soiled
...Read more

All was permitted you.
Rooted out as a misfire or
somebody's chance smudge
stabbed into a satisfied mind,

your face was feathered in spittle.
Go ahead, lick it off! Be an air-swiped flag.
Every single strange example's
A blast, a test of evidence.

What if we had known then
we ...Read more

could use more seraphs.
Anything with wings, really-
a falcon, a swallowtail.
Ravenous for marvels, I slit open
a chrysalis. Inside,
no caterpillar mid-morph.
Only its ghost in a horror of cells.
I pinch the luminous mash
of imaginal discs
and shudder, imagining
the mechanics of ...Read more

I'll keep explaining-because maybe you still don't get it
Those children in California (substitute any state), dead from gunfire-
Let me begin again in a little roof garden with my friend
I mean he mocks me lovingly on the roof and at the library book sale
My friend is not a banker but a prison activist
He used to ...Read more

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important ...Read more

The room is as we left it
But mellowed to a heightened
Dignity.
The chairs
Have summer coverings
Of cobwebs,
The teakwood lamps are there,
And still the bed sags
To the center,
And the table throws
Its weight of shadow
On the spread . . . .
. . . Folly to have left the room ...Read more

Now each of us is
a witness stand:
Vasenka watches us watch four soldiers throw Alfonso Barabinski on the sidewalk.
We let them take him, all of us cowards.

What we don't say
we carry in our suitcases, coat pockets, our nostrils.

Across the street they wash him with fire hoses. First he screams, ...Read more

My mother begged me: Please, please, study
stenography...
Without it
I would have no future, and this

is the future that was lost in time to me

having scoffed at her, refusing
to learn the only skill I'd ever need, the one

I will associate forever now with loss, with her
bald ...Read more

The wipers sweep two overlapping hills
on the glass, we are quiet against the
squeaky metronome as we often are
before the concerns of the day well up.
Today: Is it dark inside my body?
The wet cedar's dark of green-gone-black
of damp earth mending itself,
a pewter bell rung into night's collected
...Read more

This is not an age of beauty,
I say to the Rite-Aid as I pass a knee-high plastic witch
whose speaker-box laugh is tripped by my calf
breaking the invisible line cast by her motion
sensor. My heart believes it is a muscle

of love, so how do I tell it it is a muscle of blood?

This morning, I found...Read more

It sweeps away depression and today
you can't tell the heaped pin-white
cherry blossoms abloom along
Riverside Drive from the clouds above
it is all kerfluffle, all moisture and light and so
into the wind I go
past Riverside Church and the Fairway
Market, past the water treatment plant
and in the ...Read more

Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,-so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present,-condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense-
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around ...Read more

What you have not done
is without error. What you
have not said is beyond contradiction.

What you understand of God
was yesterday. Today a bicycle
waits, chained to a bench.

The success of this afternoon's nap
is the dream of lifting seven boxes,
your week, sealed with clear tape.
...Read more

Still singing in my cell
of succulents, staked by a man
who fled. Nothing personal.
How often I get that wrong...
I move on-

some man
is always fleeing, and that
is never personal. The longer
I go the fewer notes I need.
My torso a sort of hotel.
Martyrdom bores me.
My hook...Read more

after William Carlos Williams' "Queen-Anne's-Lace"
Remote purple lays claim to stem,
beside routine stripes of green and brown.
Dark as a patch of shade
in the marsh across the path
that the neighborhood kids and I,
were forbidden to pass. It is
that hue that overtakes,
the marsh that sucks in ...Read more

You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits
Your mother informs you "moon" means "window to another world."
You begin to hear words mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths
A row of yellow windows and a painting of them

Your mother informs you "moon" means "window to another world."
You ...Read more

Mid-1700s, Southwestern China
Lightning is the creature who carries a knife.
Two months now,
The rains hold watch.

Statues bury in teak
Smeared with old egret's blood.

I feel the pulse of this inferno,
Tested by the hour to know

That even torches must not waver.

In...Read more

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

About This Poem
"Winter Trees" was published ...Read more

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.

He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd; sheathed
In ribbed steel, I dare not lift ...Read more

Back of the door to his dark closet,
eye height, with clever steel
pegs I could flip both ways.
A row of pendulums. Of tongues.
Words, wordless. Witnesses
waiting to be sworn. The town secret.
A silk body, a man's plenty.
A wild ache, a knot. One painted
with gold mums, one with blood
leaves ...Read more