Dear, did we meet in some dim yesterday?
I half remember how the birds were mute
Among green leaves and tulip-tinted fruit,
And on the grass, beside a stream, we lay
In early twilight; faintly, far away,
Came lovely sounds adrift from silver lute,
With answered echoes of an airy flute,
While Twilight ...Read more

Barnegat Light, New Jersey-April 4, 2015
Because looking at myself w/ out you beside me is unnatural
& though the light is all wrong-your camera slung & up

the light feels right to me, warm & soft, your chest pressed
towards my back, both our heads angling towards the dock,

boat slips on the bay-all ...Read more

Don't you think you should have another child?
This girl I have is hardtack and dried lime
and reminds me, every groggy morning,
what a miracle it must have been
when outfitters learned to stock ship holds
with that one long lasting fruit. How the sailors' tongues,
landing on its bitter brilliance, must have ...Read more

wretched thou art
wherever thou art

I sit and work on a line and lean into the pain my mind continues
trying to think and all I come up with is a texture without ideas


and to whatever
thou turnest -


the body I have is the body I once had but they could not differ more
...Read more

The periodic pleasure
of small happenings,
is upon us-
behind the stalls
at the farmer's market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion's proclivities;
you picking up a sweet potato
turning to me 'This too?'-
...Read more

after Philip Larkin
Is all I've wanted past wanting
since I was six and delirious with fever,
an infinitive forged from a night
when giant ladybugs with toothpick
antennae patrolled my wicker nightstand.
Yes, I've been with horses since,
travelled illegally with them in trailers,
known certain ...Read more

from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower-
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint-
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.

The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots-
...Read more

Come, brothers all!
Shall we not wend
The blind-way of our prison-world
By sympathy entwined?
Shall we not make
The bleak way for each other's sake
Less rugged and unkind?
O let each throbbing heart repeat
The faint note of another's beat
To lift a chanson for the feet
That stumble down...Read more

It's not that we're not dying
Everything is dying.
We hear these rumors of the planet's end
none of us will be around to watch.

It's not that we're not ugly.
we're ugly.
Look at your feet, now that your shoes are off.
You could be a duck,

no, duck-billed platypus,
your feet ...Read more

Sometimes it's
bigger than my
body, the body

that gave it
life, that is
its life-as if I'm

a frame for
it, as if it
continues beyond

my end, although no
one, not here,
can see where

it goes, how
far, & now
it finds

its way...Read more

1 Samuel 17:56
The field soldiers remember the triumph,
a lithe boy's naal on the head of giant,
before the king rode through the ranks
to inquire about his parentage or the prince
had him bathed, his hair scented with sweet herbs.

After the crowds dwindled, because neither
one's cunning nor the ...Read more

You get into puddles with the sky
and when this fails
pit your girl against an ocean.

Choices blur and make off with rooms
in the whiteness. Winged enough to manage
your red kimono's 37 cranes in various
trajectories while you make the coffee.

You as God with rattlesnakes
and His ...Read more

Box cars run by a mile long.
And I wonder what they say to each other
When they stop a mile long on a sidetrack.
Maybe their chatter goes:
I came from Fargo with a load of wheat up to the danger line.
I came from Omaha with a load of shorthorns and they splintered my boards.
I came from Detroit heavy with a ...Read more

I had no thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florists' shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops <...Read more

Vast and gray, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and gray, and-
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
-my head is in the air
but who am I...?
And amazed my heart leaps
at the thought of love
vast and gray
yearning ...Read more

-after "Trumpet," Jean-Michel Basquiat

the broken sprawl & crawl
of Basquiat's paints, the thin cleft

of villainous pigments wrapping

each frame like the syntax
in somebody else's relaxed

explanation of lateness: what had
happened was. Below blackened

crowns, ...Read more

the bullet is his whole life.
his mother named him & the bullet
was on its way. in another life
the bullet was a girl & his skin

was a boy with a sad laugh.
they say he asked for it -

must I define they? they are not
monsters, or hooded or hands black

with cross smoke.
...Read more

You are standing in the minefield again.
Someone who is dead now
told you it is where you will learn
to dance. Snow on your lips like a salted

cut, you leap between your deaths, black as god's
periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds

in the wind. You are something made. Then made
to ...Read more

I twist myself into a knot
the day pulls taut.
I am what I am
told. Good red meat

gone necrotic. A spot of black
spread out to ruin

a perfect evening. It's the way
the weather wears me.

A cold, blank day. My blood-
burned fingers. A white noise

swelling in me...Read more

For Nicole and John

She drew a name full of winning flesh,
Victory, I mean, so that any Yes she has to say
We might say is a Yes achieved happily all her own-

And he drew a name large as any god,
Large as a wall in the center of the night, and as calm,
God in the most gracious, the tenderest way....Read more