Tag: poetry

  • Ether

    Ether

    I go with my wings to the edge of the earth, I deliberate faith and the breaking of eggs. Oh, oh, I moved here against the vacuum of your wanting for love; I’m continentally-far with these wide- swooping crows. You’re the edge of the earth falling away from my toes. You’re the turquoise planes of…

  • Absence

    Absence

    The air conditioner disturbs the birds, the church bells; they think these things are calling to them. Does this mean anything to you, as you mourn this or that, as big rain falls from a blue sky? Probably not in your lifetime will you conceive of such magnanimous panic—searching the white skies over, over for…

  • Art in Heartache

    Art in Heartache

    Of all the many waves curling onward in the river, of all the green things growing upward from the earth, I won’t say I know you, I won’t say I miss you, I won’t say I I I at all in this poem. What space then for the study of the shape of the boats,…

  • Return

    Return

    What kind of pain did you give me, sitting by the harbor, was it a false pain stretched the illusory distance of stars? was it a new pain young enough to be switched with its twin? I went back today, to our wet spot of city grass; I found a mother and her baby counting…

  • You Are Not An Idolatrous Creature of the Earth

    You Are Not An Idolatrous Creature of the Earth

    You Are Not an Idolatrous Creature of the Earth Imperatives Name definitively the body parts of a tree. A possibility becomes possible In becoming distinct. It’s hard to say: Today the sky is the shape of corpse. The collapsible shape of corpse, the perverse absence of the storm coming, feel Your body like a rock…

  • Two Pear Trees

    Two Pear Trees

    Soon I’ll forget my grandfather’s garden and the way the two pear trees stand. I’ll forget afternoon visits, stuffing his freezer with zip-locked meats. Below us, garlic hangs in a cellar above canned sauce, the caps dated in Sharpie. Soon I’ll forget the way he shows me the first ripe pear, nodding — proud, as…

  • Accent Piece

    Accent Piece

    Hydrangea in a beer bottle, How did you end up there? Who decided to pluck your beauty, And wrap it up In a Pabst blue ribbon? Yet look at you. With your ivory coif And those jade shoulders. Who gave you the right, To look like home?

  • The Turtle

    The Turtle

    Too often I find myself Roaming the aisles Of my local pet store. I watch the turtles In their ten-gallon universe, Swimming and basking. But today, The yellow shells and red eyes Spoke to me. “Why do you come to see us?” The turtles asked. “We know you won’t take us home. You just take…

  • never sit with your back to a bookcase

    never sit with your back to a bookcase

    i want to say something good like blood into a basin of stars but i’ve stopped listening to myself at least i think i have i am rolling metaphors over & over & something like a simile across the desk i tie imagery into individual burlap sacks about to them drop into a well when…

  • anchorage

    anchorage

    we are driving to a wedding & the rain is so detached hammering light into the street making it shine like something trying to disappear i’m lost but i haven’t admitted it yet all i have to navigate is one of the tourist signs that tells me how far it is to everywhere i don’t…

  • Neruda at a frat party

    Neruda at a frat party

    you ask where the restroom is & i start to weep steam coming from my shadow as you walk away has light always stumbled pursed & curled like a pork rind when you walk into a room? will my teeth crumble like peppercorns if our eyes scissor or i try to speak? i forgive you–you…

  • the peak of my literary career

    the peak of my literary career

    as a boy i collected similes or things like them sorted roadside trash by first consonant put couplets of poetry on my bike spokes like playing cards no one understood or knew where i was going but i was on the local news once on my bike jumping 15 trash cans for national poetry month