Category: Poems

Everything red has some of its properties 
carnelian alizarin a lake like other lakes 
translucent and fugitive 
After muskets armorers made gates and hardware 
Running for our lives became track & field 
Civility among the warlike never caught on 
as did bathing in flags and fabrications 
ritually dipping an arrow to remind the shaft 
of its purpose 

                           ⏤ from Blackbird 

The poem started long before you got here 
how far it can go and what will be left 
after death and revisions is being decided 

I have begun to misremember the room 
and the date how far a rose from a rifle 
pillow from the dream whose intensity 
was outside the region of visible light 

An evening without flies and no mosquitos 
the sun once bell high now tone deaf 
down behind the reservoir a sign of rushing 
into the narrows that perspective is 

What we are used to has a long history 
Lights come on in the brilliant machinery 
a frieze of wisteria juggling the sun’s small hands 
We remember through our belongings 
till all the apostrophes are gone 

                          ⏤The Gettysburg Review

Koi converse in slow circles 
of what we have not seen 
Mercy 
and the dark bottom of the pond 
The recirculating pump we call 
karma 
is only a sound and mysterious 
as well being 
A comforting surrounding 
to lives of endless destinations 

                                          ⏤The Nation

There is a heartbreaking earnestness to life 
On the midway a man was selling chameleons 
He had many on strings pinned to his vest 
It was Royal Stewart plaid They were trying 

                    ⏤The Literary Review 

Governments are systems in which no virtue is perfected 

no innocence preserved Once the Yanomamo met outsidrs 

they began planning their survival This is inevitable 

In every such discovery everyone will eventually have to dress 

in their feathers and fly in a winged horse to the capitol to ask 

for justice The pleadings will demonstrate how the roots 

of the manioc have been damaged the disappearance of animals 

and the silting of streams was like blood withdrawing from the body 

Those with no trees and not enough parking will find the metaphors quaint

⏤Subtropics
 

There are moons in me 
I have seen the x-rays 
I glow with that light 

Until the hidden was revealed 
the lush given was an ecstasy 
tempered by caution like hawks 
crossing water 

We have limited capacity 
so we say infinite and think 
we have described something 
our shorthand for what is 
beyond us 

When asked why birding 
Ellen said because 
they let us see them 

                                      ⏤ Post Road