Category: Poetry
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Saucerie Sonnet
“No,” you stopped me. “Don’t wash the pan. Pour off the grease all but a loving spoonful, scrape the grizzly scraps loose, add herbs, a little wine or coconut milk, you’ll have a sauce, the remains will sing like a choir. “Don’t toss everything away, just the ballast, the dead stuff. Select notes will…
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St Modomnóc
A Byr a Thoddaid Dear sweet wee Saint Dominic went To Wales, to David’s See, and spent Some years in study, on his knees in prayer, And caring for the bees. Such care as bishops show their flocks Modomnóc showed his bees. He’d talk Words sweet as mead. It makes bees thrive full well,…
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Hunger
Trapped in the fragments of a dream, he shrugs into a jacket, meanders into the parking lot behind his condo, sleep-sentience like tingling fingers keeping him awake. An ochre moon slides across the night, gilding a mountain lion on the slope before him, head turning as she combs the air for scent. For food,…
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Joy
I showed my student a photograph of you, Dad, and asked, “What do you see?” He studied the old black-and-white: you in a well-cut summer suit, hands on your lap, light socks and polished shoes— and said, “I see a man who wants to have fun”— not the dutiful school principal I knew, but hands…
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Santa Fe
Trembling aspens in the Sangres blush amber, Marking the death of summer yet resplendent and Witness to my sadness. The cottonwoods a flinty-gold lining the Rio Grande On the road to Taos the air smoke-scented with roasting piñons. I am here but lost somehow. The winds from the Rockies hum and wail to…
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Dens of our Grandfathers
Holy colors — deep autumn orange and yellows and reds. I can imagine strapping a crown of twigs to my head, and a mask for my face, and dancing the round dances through fields pregnant with corn and soybeans, until I collapse roadside in spent, orgasmic satiation. A dance of submission, of humble, beseeching desperation…
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Hope
I think of the deadening grass, brown. Full of November. How it lays thick and straight as a thatched roof arching down toward the creek. The sort of roof I marveled over in a book that showed cutaways of castles and homes people lived in centuries ago, when everything was handmade and at least as…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3.5: Tikhov in Awkward Rhyme
Shallow oceans for the sailing Temperatures benign at best Through the telescope tube’s lens? Venus! She invited tropical whaling Old Tikhov sketched what the probes would find with a quick & chary math He predicted a nursemaid covered in plants Waggish blue stolons on clear flushing lobes Later, people laughed at those precepts…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3: Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov
The Belarusian used chromatic aberration to decidedly advantage an unfeathering of spectrographs for the surface sobbed ruffles of the mirth with which he would flirt He ascended in a gelatin balloon to watch meteors with his friends from the Sorbonne Sternly clutched by the puffs he was, as the blue-gas-flame sibilated girlishly for buoyancy…
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Freud Considering the Eel
And this is the truth of it: we still don’t know precisely where freshwater eels come from. For 2,500 years scholars had zero luck because eels apparently lacked reproductive organs. Aristotle tried to figure it out. Italian scientists in the 1700s made it a point of national honor. In the late 19th century a graduate…
