Poetry
Well, Millstone, Cistern, Cliff (1892)
for Paul Cezanne The cistern has run dry. Now the stone well, shaped rock and unshaped, collects sound, and what is beyond sound, the crackle of wrinkled stems curling to flame. Watercolor scratched, scraped to bare stock—trees, saplings, twigs. Roots and brush, windfall limbs and fallen trunks. Broken, unbroken ground. A tent of shavings, tinder, …
Making It Back
I left when a rose flush on the snow started the whole thing again and didn’t turn back till, moonlit, I was walking through a sub-zero night, the world’s frequencies low as I stopped to listen, then followed some moon- deepened marks like Braille going in and through me but I was lost, soon reduced …
Luna
Unlike you, Khaled, I was told to look at the moon, know her hard, decipher her changing countenance so I could learn to know myself, but disobeyed that injunction too, worshipped instead her lesser twin. My native tongue has only one word for both moon and month, one luna that begins in a sliver of …
The Snow of Petals on the Fallen World: Some Second Thoughts on Capra
And yet, at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, After the clement snows have come again, And the American miracle of money, The petals still remain fallen from the rose. What’s been restored is the life once fled from, And while George Bailey’s met his angel, He’s also felt the black wind that lives …
Student Conference
At first, I mistook the small, black tattoo for a phone number or a date jotted in haste on her wrist’s paler underside— then suspected stitches when it didn’t fade. I was not far wrong. (Her poems: careful, deliberate, thin as she was, haunted by a mother years dead—not a word about the brief grief …
Landscape in the Style of Li Cheng
What if you could breathe into words what happens during the quiet relinquishments of rain in the city, the deepening grays and the hard surfaces ringing? Or that fall when my roommate would come home from the restaurant at midnight and we would go running through the empty streets, then along the river, which was …
Song of the Entomologist
Now, blowflies the size of dimes appear on windows and walls, and carpenter ants eat the house inside out and send out scouts. Soon, earwigs will fall from laundry fresh off the line, and mosquitoes whine in the bedroom all night. Angleworms will tunnel in the dark, and night crawlers, quick and slick as your …
Drisheen
Call it a sheep, call it a cow, serve it with raisins and a little salt. Inflate the casing with a forearm, yours or your mother’s, blend one serum with another, commingle with the animals. The stuff inside us has a residue, something that sticks to the filter-rib, the plane tickets and palm trees, the …
German Helmet
One of the boys lugged it to the porch. One poked it. One cracked a joke. Then someone gripped the rim, patted it like a dog. And nothing happened. No yellow burst of sulfur. Yet touching what a real live Nazi once touched felt electric. One by one we overturned the neck-stunning weight on our …