Poems

Hard power engines, hot tail pipes, dark tires, the heavy business of bumpers. And children not to be had, dart edgeless through the sun, visibly silent, lost in the sum. The crossing guard, orange vest white gloves not much, a body stationed against  losses....

I. When a friend gives you a bowl for tea, thank the friend for the gift, but not the bowl. The bowl is an object, the gift is the effort. II. When holding the bowl, do not be afraid to drop it, for it is nothing but dust formed in fire and water. When holding the...

I am looking at a photograph from World War II. A soldier stands alone staring north toward China. His left foot rests on a football as if he had just stopped its bouncing and his hat is cockeyed as if he had just slapped it on. He appears at the right edge of the...

First, the ecstasy, a spray of fresh images received, excite the body shuddering with new lyrics conceived in a flash of knowing, not complete, but enough, gravid with possibility. Then, gestation, mitosis of imagination, the laying of muscle and verb, arrangement of...

Gary Snyder, cedar smoke, wet boots. T. S. Eliot, London smoke through fog Gertrude Stein. Roses. Roses. Roses. William Carlos Williams, tincture of iodine, hydrogen peroxide. Edna St. Vincent Millay, oil slicked on the Hudson. Theodore Roethke, moist root soil. Ezra...

I have sympathy for antediluvian people, mockers before the flood, long scratches in dirt where trees were dragged, logs trimmed behind the mud baked house. sawdust thick on Noah’s windowsills. I used to think them fools, Noah’s neighbors, blind to the evidence that...

My parents’ great grandchildren stand at the brink of an alarming tolerance for an interlinked world. They can’t make a move without the MAN in the machine seeing, hearing. More frightening still, they don’t mind. Citizen now means: “the one who is watched.”  We are...

The poem kept a wary eye on the man as the woman in bed read aloud. "This is a good poem," she said, looking up at her husband. “I want no part of it,” the husband declared walking toward the door. “Wait,” she called, interrupting herself and the poem simultaneously....