I cannot tell you why
I taste death;
the cupboards
are reasonably
arranged,
the windows clean as rain.
Poetry
while climbing towards
phantasmal blue
has broken—
we lie on concrete,
begging with a
shattered golden bowl.
My breath pluming white into December
could, to God, be incense rising out
of the puffing thurible of my body.
Up here, it’s impossible to tell for the fog
From far-out depths they come,
swell swelling swell,
'til cresting they salute the sky
and tumble towards sand that waits immemorially
to receive them.
Summer u
The narcotraficante commanded me
in gestures, take off your blouse.
Then he jerked it, scattering buttons—
smooth and pink—along the ground.
- noticing the migrant workers—
- two to a wheelbarrow of concrete—
- mending the walls of the rich
- that exclude them
"The wind blows wherever it pleases." Word?
The scene is played out. We need some Eden!
Were Abba the DJ, He'd spin hymns
To slay.
we nailed God down
He's at the back of the property
He's going nowhere, sir
His feet are stuck
to a block of wood
It's comical, sir
I went there once,
to the place you’re imagining.
It was purple, with wild geraniums
under green-bright stars.
All the constellations spelled
words, like &
After the olive groves at Samothrace and fog
which billowed up from a green sea,
the rocky sheep path and bleating ewes,
wind and sun—there w
She left
with her sack of stones
and one dying rose,
fragrant as Pinot Noir.
Your letter through the slot
slid to the floor and lay quite still
all day, until returning home from work
I seized and tore it open.
If ever you have wakened in the night—
the steep blue night, and waited for the tears—
then I must tell you—
Driving east on Jackson Street one morning,
only a couple of blocks from the bungalow on Abe Street
where a few years ago hundreds of people claimed
to see the reflection of the Virgin in an upstairs window,
I noticed that the diner with the orange awnings
was advertising “fish wings” and found myself wondering
whether fish wings might be some Asian delicacy
Was the cry they heard a kestrel’s or a distressed gull
or a passing soul or one not wanting to, a disciple
asked as fog burned off the harbor and left the water
glazed with fire: Jesus roused from dozing lightly. Sun
turned the shore rocks ocher. A bee thrummed near;
they watched it hover. John, who squatted to mend a net,
beneath debris and stench
a hand
your hand withered
stretched forth
waiting for someone’s
be healed