All Poetry

She is said to carry a wooden box
instead of a basket, the one who appears
when you lay to waste

I’ve never lived near lochs like Ness.
The lakes I like are stocked with less.
Their fens are penned. The glens are gleaned.
The geese are cooked. Their fish are cleaned.

It is disproven to me in a dream, the mountain
as weight fixed in place. The lapse of a seal-as-such

Beware the smiles of kind old men,
the brownstone flipped and paid in cash,
the "Yes we can!" yelled yet again,
the winners of the market crash.

a ghost in a shotgun (a
tear on the floor)
they thought we were
brothers and
he’s off to war.

overnight
unexpected flowers
snow in April

It’s strangewishful; its days
are languageful; itself
a grackle, a fieldfare
of words.

I miss all my old lovers, wherever they
lay bleeding beneath the grass, I would
take them all once again in my arms and
tell them that it is not that bad, that it
will all be all right;
death after all seems so unreachable

And this I thought, as I licked his
blood from the shore, for all the
hatred the strife and the wars, this
when eternity slams shut her last
door, this at long last was
worth dying for.

Alone is just a word.
Like a marigold,

It can be just one mode,
a way of saying
I am here, we are here.
We have always been!.

So let me dance and let me burn
as all this universe doth churn,
and when eternity is done
at last at least I had my fun.

Jesse Bradley's slideshow for his poem "The Bones of us".

Whistle like a bird, with your syrinx.
Your larynx is mammalian, fit for jazz
and yodeling and tissue-paper-and-comb

Ann Drysdale reads her poem "Weirdness Observed."

I can't tell the story but I somehow know
there was a sign ("No U-turns") and
a sound of the air like bees, like
weaving.

I circumambulated the colatitude
of Dichtungswissenschaftlichkeit,

there’ll be no other record at all;
prominent sources unsaid it.

I like to think the burglars of the past
All felt like me: That after the cutlery
Was stored away, the candles doused,
The band sent home, the maitre d’

Alone and with a water glass

Dawn descends like a dominant seventh,
muzzy and mean as a muskmelon's mother.
The light lours with a lecherous leer,
groping and glaring.

But underneath you feel the rancid movement
Of all decay. Bananas gain their spots.

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level——
Just straightforward words without boustrophedon, picot edging, or bevel.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
and see yourself mirrored as a hippopotamus, a slender gazelle, or a thin doe,

Some days, what I remember still
Surprises me. Last year in late
May, the cicadas showed up shrill,
Their ceaseless organs airing Mate,
No, mate with me. They titillate

In the orchard of lost keys, all the dead sisters speak together...

1 The bootstrap of the genie of Jesus Christ, the song of David, the sop of Abraham.

The other words then, too; sing Nina’s woe
In her sultry old blue mood indigo;

We sat on Tomales Point, his lips were dry and cracked inside my own; I could taste what we had had for lunch some three hours before.

I descend from the men of stone and walking,

Conceit as the subtext: the absent made concrete,
the present its context; the airhead as aesthete

I-65 has stalled. The spokes
Of Old Crow’s “Wagon Wheel” have spun
The road enough. The singer tokes
And hopes to God he’ll see his one

True baby tonight. The saga, sign—
The fatal bus crash in the ‘80s—
I’m not far from the Buckeye line.
And there’s a milk truck and Mercedes

Yes, curious,
that calciferous
coiled carapace,
the ocular stalks,

Tomāto, tomăto,
Potāto, potăto:

Where there is space. There is, no doubt, an arc
Of narrative: first there, then now, silence
And silencing progressions of the dark,
Away from missions with all the violence
Of smashing lips, clothes torn, legs splayed across
A naked mattress. This story is the land
Of climax, denouement, and albatross.

Yours the moon
mine the Milky
Way a scarf

around my neck
I love you
as the night

I must have lost my accent years ago—
that’s if I ever had it, twanging vowels,
slurred consonants—something I suppressed
between the tongue and teeth and throat and jowls
or simply lacked. I really don’t quite know.

I do not like the ampersand,
the thing for “and.”
We have the alphabet at hand.
If one means “et”
and Latin for “the rest of it,”
why have “c” writ
with ampersand, half-cooked, half-raw?

Moving straight; moving bare
With saddled song of regrets.
Staying put; moving away
Along a barbed-wire junction

and the boy wants nothing more than to sit in the sun
but always arrives too late: the diagonal line dividing the yard
into equal areas of sun and shade
vanishes as soon as he gets there.

Bug-eyed again. I’m awake in the grip of my clenching and grinding
teeth. And once wakened, my jaws lock down on the notion of death.
Yes, they were always connected, teeth and mortality,.

And this was his, this Dutch interior, entered
And possessed, so tranquil and yet so busy
With details: the couple’s shed clothes scattered
On the backs of armchairs, the dog chasing a shoe,
The wide open window, the late afternoon light.

I liked it when my arse was
                tickled with a feather by
                                Botticelli virgins
                                                in a knocking shop,

It’s been well documented, the taking apart of Robert Lowell’s scaffolding. For any poet interested in the debate between form and free verse, this phase of Lowell’s life is critical to know.

I’m sorry but I have to ask you this.
How do you write when you have nothing to say?
(When I said “you,” I meant “one.” Is that okay?)
What do you think of psychoanalysis?”

I’m in. Insipid nitpicks pick gits,
NIN licks. Flickr clicks, kids
pinning pics, wit, is it? If I tick it,
list it, it’s nil. This infirm whining,
in fir ring I ching if I tri ill
schtick it’s in.

Assemble what you need--bamboo,
Brown paper, string, a pot of glue,
Feathers from Highland capercaillies,
Gut from guitars or ukuleles,
Stout cardboard, twenty small brass screws,

a fling a flare a fire affair a force a form—quick, like a running stitch

I carry a blackjack going out
so if there’s trouble I at least
won’t go to the hospital alone,
but in a blizzard before dawn
no criminals are on the street,

Then when sex concludes,
pronouns reassert themselves
to carve out separateness,
pushing us along grooves
of lives that turn in widening
circles around each other.

I’ll fuck you in the ass and throat,
Aurelius and Furius:
both of you tend to play the bitch.

What is the tactic of dread?
          Dread permeates time.

Child, have you tasted dread?
          On my tongue I have tasted the chyme.

Let us read the papers, my dear,
and discuss the news,

let us be subdued,

and suddenly lewd.

There’s something here that stirs her in her soul—
Like Glory Hallelujah, his caress
The day that he got her from UPS—
Blues Clues, the Muppets, each Incredible,

X, ex, axes, axis. We are not evil.

You

You piece together what you can, when you can.
In the meantime, breathe as if your chest is an ocean.

This is my little samba,
humble and sincere,
for landlocked stevedores
unloading crates of beer.

For the shouted call and return,
the order and harangue,
the hiss and squeal of brakes,
the tailgate’s scrape and clang.

Sound the sounds
Around the silence:

Sounding sounds
Surrounding silence,

          This is the soul’s whistling
over the Vietnamese rooftops, over the fathers and daughters

over the singed and the poor.
This is about campfires, suburban fires made by husbands

Lo! An op-art Venus
with rhinoceros teeth
sits on the railroad tracks
in plaid lederhosen
selling indulgences.

it is not because I am an aspen.
If I should speak of dream,
or smoke,
or eternal weather,
it is not for lack of flesh
and matter.

In the grove, there were three birds like a choir.
In the alley, cat after cat like drunks from the bar.
In the dream, the guitarist’s solo face in a mural.
Gather all the pieces into your favorite bag.

Better watch out or motes of fairy dust
      will inundate your eyes
with sunlight's surface glittering.
      It isn't so much lies

The boy was shy. He was quietly bored in the dark house but too nice to say so.

A dead woman told me: Gardening,
simply, is laughing and swimming
a chorus of little brown miracles
in water so clear you can see yourself
and your own brown hands becoming clean.

How the dead live on in us,
how we learn they do not die—
how their photographs possess their souls
as if they still breathed.

The long-standing juniper bush
got the axe from us this year.

We’re side by side like always at the window
Except that she is five years old and I
Am demonstrating how we spread our thumbs
And index fingers to enlarge the world.

I can hear the sound of his rattling keys
as he opens the door of the season and frees
the fruits to do what they must and they please
as the days of their reckoning come.

The power is out and it comes—a darkening
cloud-laced sky, cobwebs in acid rain—obscuring
night's concave shield chased with constellations.
The stories are gone. There is no consolation.
Only this darkness now seeps into us—dusk
of the half-blind, old, decrepit, the half-ghost husk

Poor quill pig,
we’ll bury you beneath the pines
where you lived and died, a Taoist,
not releasing a single needle
unless attacked.

I knew you in the Holocene,
that eyeblink sliver;
now I'm growing back,
losing my legs, my lungs,

black black black black black black
in tones of black and black on black
the canvases are tagged abstract
expressionist on every plaque
although the artist will attack
abstract and shun the word the lack
of it will not distract the claque
in black black black black black

32 Warhol is a collaboration between Guzman, filmmaker Jerimiah Whitlock of Colorado and Texas, and translator Bjorn Wahlstrom, a Swede living in Hong Kong. The poem was written by Guzman, narrated and translated into German by Bjorn Wahlstrom and filmed by Jerimiah Whitlock.

This will be
the last time we can coax him from his lair

to meet his old friend, Vermeer,
who so rarely stops by Minneapolis.

In any case, they no longer seem
to have anything to say to each other.

Christ, immortal butterfly,
pinned and always on display,
bless this house, so prim and right,

Tullus, I’m not afraid to sail with you
the Adriatic or Aegean blue;
with you, I’d trek those peaks of Scythia’s,
or farther south than Memnon’s palaces;
but my girl hugs my neck, and blocks my path,
and begs, and blanches, and turns red with wrath.

Last night I fell
into the sky

with silver gulls
light as they.

We have Beckett conversations:

            

Are you a lion or a gorilla?
            I’m your daughter.
            When did they let you out of jail?

            

What have you got in your hand, Dad?
He peers into his empty palm.
            A bush.

A stag chews waist-high grass under an elm.
Its herd sleeps, each a bright, wet weed,
in a freshly rain-swept field turning in the wind,

flashing dark then bright like a soldier’s skin—
my bronze arm paling into my shoulder’s moon.
Wind brushes the stag and me.

spirals in the shell you left behind,
on staircases, in tiny unseen rooms,
interstices, hidden ventricles,
auricles collapsed and yet alive,

Within a room, the woman comes and goes
in cinematic dream scenarios;
such is the pleasure dome which you decreed,
where satisfaction’s safely guaranteed

and takeaway becomes the food of love.

Pacific 231, symphonic movement—Artur Honneger
You'd never know this concert was a black-tie affair
when you hear the violins going "Meow"
and the horns subjecting your auric-
ular senses to la peine dure et
forte, bombarding your ears point-blank.

Your son turns restive in his sleep
Whispered away by morning to dusk

Verses bloom along his wrists and throat
In bright sentences his name is cut

52. Ghosts shape the residual.
53. Shapes ghost the residual.
54. There are many possibilities for white for black.
55. Including the impossibility of their existence.
56. The gray shades reach out in both directions.
57. The gray shades hunt the black in the white the white in the black.
58. The gray shades that made the shadow city now haunt this impossible Gotham.

like the thirty politicians who hanged
or gassed or shot themselves that April,

like a prisoner in Leopoldov undergoing
an appendectomy without anesthesia.

It was a beautiful anomaly — an algal bloom
masquerading as a full-skirted oak
the people mistook for pine.

He speaks a broken language of beach and Broadway and on the way to shore gets lost and finds himself in a cemetery at sunset, pink light on the stones.

He cannot read the inscriptions but kneels down at a cenotaph anyhow and recites the only prayers he can remember.

Why, when we wanted to speak to nothing but water, is he singing verses down into the stone hard earth in a town he has never belonged to, lost on his way to the shore?

for cul-de-sacs are something like an isle,
the way a stubby wing is like a fin,

the way a television’s like an eye,
or suburbs are like towns, or clocks like time,
or dodos are like angels waddling by,
or Liberty’s the backside of a dime.

cruel clothes

the sheer sea

rain squall

the cold weed

By cover of night tree to tree
strung any place through

Seen clear sun      cold lake soul
found any place home

Now done under           woven to spill

Blue night lake foal

Aim for the sky. Cock the shit and shoot.

The block is. Hot, the block is hot
Ashes to ashes, dust to... Dust
It. Watch it. Turn it. Leave it.

The sea beyond her room, the sky, the wind
shivering the window glass with rain,
the stoic fir tree letting go a limb
while greener branches tremble, weathering

You aren't crated, egg-basket, your shells
chipped like flint. There are a dozen wands
bound for the dump, for you, curiosities,
me hunched on the bathroom floor. I can feel you,
slight bump, right ovary, competition,
compensation.

It was a day like this one, just as bright,
which set this love, with all to lose, alight.

It was a day of perfect charity,
in whose blue breezes strolls eternity,
where, freed from the stifling loads it has to bear,
the earth can play, a child without a care.

Be ready to absquatulate
if that should prove the wisest course.
Meanwhile, shout until you're hoarse,
declaim, cajole, confabulate,
pontificate, prevaricate,
but never, never show remorse.

The graph of truth and error is stochastic,
With slippery slopes of bell curves everywhere;
Concise accounts are always periphrastic,
And equable environments are rare.

You either kiss this kind of girl, or smack her!
She says things decent women never say,
flirting as fiercely as a firecracker.

Some thrive in an arbor of privacy
             like wisteria.

Others rot in the dark

here is a darker side, it dawns on me.
A story is unfolding in real time:
matters of moment seen sequentially,
framing the fate we play out line by line.

Persistent visions of those sweeping scenes,
the disenchantments of a distant view:

You had my heart,
made yours my gift.
You had my heart;
luck was our part.

They fucked up your tattoo!
That man on the crucifix is supposed to be completely nude

So let me say up front I’ve never had
a personal relationship with Christ,
although Lord knows I’ve tried.

A garnet sun arose and bled
until the field in early morning
blazed up like poppies, but I've read
such glory means a weather warning,

I saw an eagle dive across the angel-wing-draped sky
Protect me from this omen
Can it be long before these lanterns flicker out and die
Pray for me, blue-eyed woman

Blue clouds gesture to an absence in the wind.
Slate blue and bruised, they beckon, and magnetic,
draw the hushed expectancy of all things in.

Mao,
The Pathet Lao
rightly throw in the hoosegow

This is your atoll. Reef crumbles to the touch. The artist paces along the beaches here, and you've loved her for awhile—delicate and glittering. She walks back and forth talking to herself and finds, trapped in a tide pool, a small jellyfish.

He'd slept an hour in the last forty eight.
Just one more time, and he would hit the road.

A feather duster up on stilts
Who favors neither pants nor kilts,
He thinks his native state is splendid
And gads about as God intended.

These are your salt flats. They lie past the highways, past the towns with gas stations whose names sear the eye in mono-syllable and neon.

Purple silence is my favorite – deepest,
most resonant – brown the murkiest –

When it was all over, my father came back
a rack of bones with a stammer.

These are your laws. Having the sharpest eye, the artist had rendered the coast so perfectly, you can see the array of our batteries aimed at the horizon.

Victoria surrenders in her way,
consorting with her enemy. This hour,
when honeysuckle-seekers cease their play,

The populace, attired in charcoal gray,
communicating sotto voce, plies
its ashen paths and paving stones today.
On sidewalks, pushing through the subway stiles,

They wear their bedrolls on their backs and descend like strange dromedaries as they crisscross down the trails made by the goats.

In Hallikarnassos, Herodotus
Pondered the past—and how odd it is:

            Yes, yes, with your
yellowish skin, you enjoy
      meditating within the shape of
a wishbone, inside the broken wing

I knew what I knew
And I knew it was you
With the eyes of a child and a heart untrue,
Because, because
Of the way it was
Down Oz when times were wild.

Shadow sprite, a revenant bottom feeder,
spookfish, ratfish, rabbitfish, enigmata,
glides a mirror drone in the sun-comb strata,

Ann Drysdale reads Janet Kenny's "Wail in Lost Muddle Earth Dialect (After Brueghel)".

I waked up an’ t’ world were al smashed’n broken
Sea wus hoigh an’ fushes ariz a-spewin’
Men gone mad wus kullin’ n’slashin, pratin’
Of the end comin’

She bit his head off but he had it coming.
He was unfit to live. He had to die.
Blood cakes the calendar. The air is humming.
She tore his head clean off. He had it coming.
The sun is silent and the night is drumming.
The night calls out for Justice. Tooth and eye
Compels this blessed hammer of the Lord
Whose instruments are Fire and the Sword.

and so I threw away my plutos

In this graveyard in Morocco
old tombs are incognito

flattened slabs of stone
abrade and bleach to bone

no letters, sculpture, form
defy the earth and worm

pale dogs nose around
to guard the sacred ground.

The tiny bones of children in a cupboard,
The ghost of Garbo knitting in the chair
Beside your bed, the rocking of the eggshells,
Descending dust that glitters on the air,

spinning a beard of early November.

Now that Paris, its cobbles and effigies,
And fog and roofs are far enough from my eyes;
Now that I'm beneath the boughs of trees,
And I can muse on the beauty of the skies;

Roads dissolve into lines,
criss-crossing the city,
punctuated by stop signs,
orange lights. Cars are words.
Some stuck in congested phrases,
stuffed with headlights.

The world where I live is the world that I make,
And the world that I make is the world that I wish,
And the world that I wish is the road that I take,
That I take to the dark of an underground lake,
And the answer to this is a fish, is a fish,
And the answer to this is a fish.

Start at the very beginning:
the deer and its fawn browsing
nervously at the edge of our yard,

John Marcus Powell reading his poem Milles Feuilles.

The crew assembled, every eye cast down.
No noose. Bare hands. A breathless man sinks down.

Spread-eagled on both feet, or on bent knees,
no pirate worth his salt lusts lying down.

The only ones to have
survived the night
are a Japanese family
who have switched off
the neon signs in their heads
and made do with the light
over the mountains

I turn a page, I drink dark beer from a bottle.
The light is swallowed up,
drafts of warm air shoving clouds
inside themselves until they burst.

R. Nemo Hill reads "For a Gardener" from When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press).

Antique and frantic and antediluvian,
Monument massive, impassive, magnificent,
Rich as the Inca, the golden Peruvian,
Omnidirectional, omnibenificent,

In midsummer
the way between our homes
is blocked

the streets snowed up

In my own city, I never dine
in outdoor cafés, preferring the discreet
anonymity of dark recesses
to hide my blunders, social, spiritual,

Love leaves its aftermath:
you change the sheets, you crave a bath,
peel lurid lipstick's skin from skin
while mirroring your rictus. Thin,
white lines like lies along your arm—
telltales of "superficial" harm.

Drift ice in your eyes
hoarfrost in your heart

your hands
untamed sled dogs

The words, the books, the strain,
the loneliness, the pain,

the beast of woe, the lion roar,
it doesn't matter anymore

because I have a thought,
tamed, soothed, caught:

the poetry I said to you,
the lines that led to you,

She was an orchid by a mountain pass,
along an Appalachian trail of blue.
He was a hemlock near the cotton grass,
with crooked branches, needles, limbs askew.

Six days
and the world came into being

and ever since we have
strewn sands on canvases
and rounded up horses in poems

John Whitworth reads two poems, "Aaargh" and "As Tall As Trees" at the 2012 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. Credit to Magarida Malarkey and Sarah Lawrence College.

His right hip has a swivel to it—very slight—
      Yet just enough to misalign the knee;
And then, in turn, to twist the ankle, so the foot
      Can never quite fall flat upon the ground.

I could decide to credit the old stories—
Greek myths, saints' legends—that he's a god in mufti.
That the warm fragrance of alcohol on his breath
is there to test my charity

Would you like to buy it?
My heart is for sale.
Would you like to buy it,
no haggling over it?

God's made it a lover's,
you'll make it your own;
God's made it a lover's
for one lover alone.

Only the English would breed such an apple,
so sour you must smother it with sugar.
I have had enough of all those women's pastry,
light as wheedling, blackmail in the butter,
their sugar hissed to hide all that is tart.

The scorpion, ink black,
            looks out
                        from his muscled back,
            its eyes pierced
and piercing,

But some things
can make love

a torment.

Sun licks the gardens of Queen Square,
tall chimneys, smoke of bluebells, near
where Mr Eliot strolled to work.

He wrote the words which stunned me, when
he crossed the bridge with other men,

Recall you still
before going to bed

sometimes
I say a prayer
that only includes you
and dreams about a tiny boat

the work of building suits
or words demanded more
than there was power for.
Those days, we didn't know
the surging river's flow
had nearly reached our door.

When do they start? Flames spit. The landlord chats,
the landlord says, "Mummers have their own time.
They'll be along." Along, already, sit
a grave man with striped scarf; lone ales; the girls
with dyed black fringes. One loud group clinks wine
by piled plates. Sharp pipes cut through their hum,
off-key, like breath, wavered with the wind's swirls.
Through new doors, fresh with dark, the Mummers come.

There are two cities--or maybe just one--seen through the eyes of the other--an otherworldly reflection of efficiency. Somewhere shampooed dogs bark at the moon while mouldering cats scratch their replies six feet under.

The rhino is a gentle sort
who's locked his heart inside a fort
(or, since it moves, more like a yurt),
afraid he'll get his feelings hurt.

Wouldn't you be happy to have written Lunch Poems?
No, not to have been Frank O'Hara, not Frank O'Hara
With all that entailed.

The stableyard hangs lit. It is a ship
with its warm galley in the house below.
Now, through the rain and mud, our seaboots slip.
The horses, with their billowed rugs, blot glow
of wind-tossed bulbs. They crash like waves into
their strawed, lit stalls, stare over cabin doors
while barrows, bales and buckets creak and flow.

Even as we transfer him from the gurney to a bed,
try two, three, six times to insert a catheter,
sweat under heating lamps, dress his wounds,
and wrap him in sterile blankets, we know
why he did it.

What current between us
touches abandoned days
to the present of yes?

Your face on the pillow
rapt in a distant glow
of self-loss, undertow,

Behind the scenes
Is where the Real is;
The Real is
Behind the scenes,
Where you wouldn't care, perhaps,

A call in a flickering tunnel
packed with human multiforms.

Dash up the down escalator
gasping like a salmon,

but not so solemnly,
onto the rain-wet pavement.

   Sometimes, working    at the world's surface,
I must roil waves,    must wrangle currents
to force the flood-waters'    flint-gray spate
back at the beaches.     Spray-flecked breakers
whack the walls    of cliffs. The water
dimly beneath them     heaves. The deep
is a mountain, looming.     Lurking in its wake,

The birds build nests of coins and drought turns earth
so it will not release the grass and makes
leaves on the trees grow thick, dark green-too dark.

Eyes do amazing things. I see an owl in a wooden bowl.

a small wolf eating a caul

a girl holding the leg
of a broken doll

a true egg
fertilized by a swan

did not return. By absence, you shall know them,
we can pause so much, swift screens, our tunes,

Left everything. Left Laos in '78.

As fossil hunters
we seek spines

Somewhere at sea the currents shifted and
As they rolled past the coast, removed the sand.

The racks at Goodwill, they're packed with wedding dresses.
Salvation Army, stacked with those sad white dresses.
Old dreams dropped at the curb. Post-breakup messes.

Those beads on skinny threads, just watch how they fall.
Those skirts like limp balloons. That skimpy tulle-
It's called illusion, baby. Time to get real.

Gone are the curls of smoke,
gone are the tears in the eyes.
They've vanished up the coughing flue
into the pouring skies.

I'm taking it all with me - the metallic sighs,

It's not the drought
or the dust swirling everywhere.

Stencilled on the mid May evening light, the relic stands -
avocado trees squatting below the bowl; iron belts and mesh

i crocodile i cool
licorice or loco

This is what remains:
pink granite cliffs, white-capped sea
gorged on carnal rains.

The smell of steel and oil is the incense of our labour.
            In fields shot green with growth, brittle with grain,
or bare as anvils—we extend our hands over the iron altar.
Sometimes visions are lost through the slip of a spanner,
            a misplaced nut blurs a thought equally as a collapsed jack.

My father kick-started
A dead man with the heel of his shoe

...And finishing on carbon macrophages.
Data show sustained ability
to activate reverse cholesterol

After the goshawk and gymnogene take to the sky and roost,
the ample leisure of sunlight falls red on a breeze turning over
lost paths—the treasure of compost underfoot, warm and soft,
dark with secrets of millipedes and termites.

At first, it's only a hoof where my left foot
used to be, and the only inconvenience

The greenest green expands into an endless interlacing,
a braid of Celtic knotwork in a disappearing network

Both men spat red dirt—the tractors' engines echoing off cypress
windbreaks smudged silver with heat; gears, shafts and star-wheels
turning circled motion into windrows. Dust steamed off the grass,
the earth alive with lizards and field mice darting beneath kestrels

December 3
Herman Cain
Could not explain
His unwanted advances,
Which wrecked his chances.

Hermetic in a private cask,
a mollusk lives inside a mask

This is significant. A perfect ten,
Aim of toxophilites and dancing men.
Ten is important, ten's the magic key
To arithmetical complexity
And every calculation in our lives
Depends upon a double bunch of fives.

In a field of wheat,
on a dragon's tongue,
at the bottom of

a bottle of rum
at the axiom

of a metaphor
and a bad pun,

Once again
That language
of silence
of dumbness

My lover's brain is so sharp,
so lush with Latinate zingers,
it lacerates
the lapidarian's fingers.

we have sighted the claw of the infant spring,
and heard the bighorn's hoof ring.
Like children we have peered into
the crib of the west, the canyon's rib,

and the empty nest. Like children we
have wondered who induced all this,
and what comes next.

Almost home.
Home
says Gwendolyn

is

Huckleberry's raft

a neighbor in his garden

No eyes. No brain. No heart.
They drift and sting.

The quality of the outside light is shifting,
a chilly glare thawing to something brighter,
something softer, something slowly drifting
into a Maxfield Parrish glow, a hint
at least. The pulse picks up. The head gets lighter
as something like romance scents the cloying air.
A coming fling? It isn't that at all.
No woman waits behind a brownstone's stoop.
It's something else. I'll let you in the loop:
I'm thinking of New York some time last fall.

Kru child, Kru child.
Barefoot in a pond
of grass and water.

I used to suffer
bouts of knowing
the ordinary
was always growing…

I know your works:
netting palm-sized oysters
and shrimp, stinging them
with cayenne and lemon.

your departure will let them in
the phonies and their gilded songs
the teeth of the fish I have
without mercy eaten though…

You had woken up in an empty house built in the middle of greenery that spread out for miles; a table in the living room was weighed down with food and drinks that would be replenished when you were asleep or simply looking away; and every so often, you marveled to yourself about how you never had to work or go hungry again; how there were so many toilets in the house that never got stuck or anything; and how nice that the water was always warm when you bathed, with fresh clothes waiting miraculously on a wooden stool at the foot of your luxurious bed, even though there was nobody you could actually see or thank;…

Consider the moths throwing themselves into lampposts,
knocking the threshold of light: consider the fireflies'

green glow, clear as human need:…

A graph aligning hertz and decibel.
A shell, conducting sound from minute bones
precisely calibrated to transmit
compression waves through cilia so frail
the follicles eroded, oxygen-
deprived at birth.

You've seen it all,
the crawling of the great lake,
the Isis age, the blue divide,
the rising of the great wall,
the dull herd, the changing guard,
the collaring, the canyoning,…

I am using both of them on him at the same time and he is moaning and shit and my arms are aching and not just my arms but my fingers from gripping and twisting the lubed-up things and I imagine in some funny way I am trying and failing and trying and failing to nail him with rubber dildoes to the headboard against that his head keeps pounding like a wild fist on a door and when it is finished I climb politely off the bed then rush off to wash my hands in the bathroom sink but when I step back into the room he is still naked and wearing the most ridiculous wig asking if I can take a picture of him against the pale orange glow creeping in from the living room…

Like water, here, in a standing wave,
the marriage of a forward surging force
and some impediment (a limestone laved
for years and years, down in and up against
what it can and cannot modify),

To explain my life in writing—

oh, I can only describe night-gowns on a clothesline
twisting in twilight against black trees

dividing the curtains
of blossom, pylons, highways, space between

To explain my life in writing—

oh, I can only describe night-gowns on a clothesline
twisting in twilight against black trees

dividing the curtains
of blossom, pylons, highways, space between

Have you seen X?
Missing person website,
vigil by candlelight,
their last effects

made souvenirs.

Last summer the lawns were patched with tan
and war raged on in Afghanistan.

I watched a family walk away
from their home, at noon on a blistering day.

The apples wait in a bowl, so pick one; the apples tug at the hem of my hunger—the love of apples; they appear in a poem about a bowl of apples; they are as serene as monks; apples cannot know the colour of the bowl they are in; apples in a poem are not edible; neither is the bowl; the apples fight for my attention; in fact, this happens very slowly; the apples revel in their nudity and know nothing about sin;…

Trust things to remain the same and something happens; watch that thing which happens, just watch it and see what happens; the paper boat disintegrating into the water that buoyed it like a lover, all grooves and gentle caresses; but you will not believe me, which is the foundation of every problem, every panic-attack;…

Emily lay naked reading the evening paper by the fire.
            Pan watched her. Sweet tobacco smoke rising from his pipe,
                        Brahms heavy off the wireless.
For the first time in fifteen years, he found himself really looking at her.
            She had goats' legs.
            Everything else perfectly human.