while collecting bones & grief’s secrets in the brackish shoals,you found a bottle buried among the muddy sand & broke the cork’ssalt-crystal seal. the floral flight of honey filled you, broke upyour childhood’s iodine brine. you anointed a hand withthe sweet stuckness & considered the way the light held you—untilyour hand’s halo disintegrated as a …
titled with a line by Lyn HejinianThe lisp went unnoticedbecause I was mute as a swan, no one spoke to mein turn I spoke to no one, it was time as riverand the river long as the Hudson,not a stroke of it depicted by the River School. I hear tulip trees blossomin showy fashion, though, …
In the 1979 “counterclockwise” study, eight elderly men were asked to spend a week together at a retreat staged to look, feel, and sound like 1959. The men all “showed dramatic improvements in their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and general well-being.”Cover me in the blue film of new appliances.Let me be freshly delivered and undented.I …
between my ribs, somewhere:1 fluxes of heat and carbon,2 reefs of sky, ships3 whose names have long eroded.4 we wore ourselves weary during5 a summer squall,6 the waters rising7 —events preserved in8 root-bronzed water.9 graves everywhere so many shades:10 deep blue skull,11 old milk tin,12 lingering green below the wake.13 we bury our history14 in …
A girl in a green dress with a white sash for Christmasis easily ruffled.Why can’t you stand still?Why do you talk so much?Yes, the mouth is stuffedwith words, the smile a bit wryas the flash bears downlike car headlights,and the eyes, you can hardly see, but they’re no less redthan the glassy eyes of the …
I suppose I can be forgiven for believing my brain might kill me, for failing to fulfill the prophecyof potential. Even with the shabby gifts of a scalpel and a torch. I know, you want the signpost ofbright plumage. You want to know who gets the beach house. Who gets stuck with the cat. Whatabout …
My father died while I wept on his lap. We didn’t much care for each other at that point, but still, he stroked the back of my head. That same year in the late summer an eerie series of freezing rains were followed by eight inches of ice pellets in Mora County. The whole valley …
Inside, late afternoon sun passingthrough the window, I followa circle of light that darts on the ceilingwhen I move my arm, my watch’s glassits origin. When I hold my arm still,my dead son comes to light,as if each one of my days still livesat a distance, but a distancethat can be traveled at the speed …
I come from a line of people intimate with the dead, my mother taking my hand when I was a boy and placing it on the face of my dead great-grandmother, first her forehead, then her cheeks. My mother said my body would keep the touch of her body. I repeated what she had taught …
(“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats)a. First course, salad: Breast, Butterfly, Being.Dessert, tautology explosion where Energy equals Lightspeed²x a body. (See physicist toe asphalt in megaton shoesasking if blast photo equals cold pastoral.) Language school.b. If Truth is the egg, is Beauty a chicken? Being mostly speechless,the Urn doesn’t ask how taut must be …