The Recital

poetry
  Because the final piece ended with the organ turned off but the keys still pressed down,   there was a rush of air, as if the whole church exhaled,…

Her Story

poetry
(Johnson City, Tennessee)   What a ruckus—those fricatives inside that truck, spitting out roadside muck digging itself in deeper.   Overhead the sky’s one eye looks down. Near full it…

Self-portrait

poetry
  To keep out the sand I built a house to uncover   each night its black name I built   poems I sang to keep small things   small…

February

poetry
  This, the old month when we live inside listening to talk-radio or watching afternoon movies like children sick with the flu.   Tonight I danced a corpse road tapping…

Chihuly

poetry
  It is to be born into a fragile garden between today’s rain and my left brain   where the artist hangs like one of these colorful characters with nowhere…

On a Cold Day

poetry
  The snow carries the chill of Novocain, the dentist’s Latex fingers that taste of nothing. What Is the circumference of your absence? I play Jerry Butler And Otis Redding…

Night Sky

poetry
  Tonight the full moon slips like a coin into God’s own pinball machine.   Auden called it a “clockwork spectacle.” Perhaps he was wrong—just once.   And Victorian Meredith…

Elegy for Zack Flash

poetry
  Riding out to the Coney Island end of the line, with a view to look into the third-story world I read about, I stop at Smith-9th   to frame…

Lament

poetry
Eros   —lord how the loved infuriate, the cat’s fangs in my petting hand, the fern in the fernery grey & limp as old kelp & the woman re-writing all…

String Theory

poetry
  I have been ridiculous: crying in the street, holding frozen spoons against my eyes, as if they could cure. Months pass with only cloud cover. Tonight, grief lacks the…

Encomium

poetry
—for PJW   So gentle a man, yet so fierce a passion for poetry! I’ve known him to argue   for five minutes together against a misplaced comma or another…