The names are gone. The Young One, who used to pound on the piano with such fervor, has grown up. Fervor. Now there’s a word. Why does fervor remain when he has lost so many names? All the important ones. Gone. Gone with one stroke. Stroke. That’s the word he’d wanted at the pharmacy. Not a strike like in baseball, but a
Continue reading… "Piano Forte"What have we lost
to know
a brother, a husband
a friend
was needed elsewhere,
she cuts her feet on bones of the river
crimson pools on long glacial slide
of moss crusted boulders tipped
on broken pieces of themselves
teal ochre bronze bright bed of jewels
The slump and twist, the sag and pooling,
the edges of bone that steam reveals.
So this is what I will look like at eighty.
And perhaps they are thinking: so this is what
A saint swings frantically,
flinging her blessings across the bus.
I try to ask the woman next to me,
about the loaves she carries
and she thinks I want to buy them all.
Continue reading… "Crossing the Andes in Early Evening"The creek here does not fail at the height of summer.
It’s an echo chamber, undersong
of winter’s orchestral weight, when violin sections
of fern-frond bowed rain’s legato.
You move through light
like water through a throat
accomplice to every living curve
as though at any moment
you might encounter god
Soon I was coveting again: latest
Kenmore refrigerator, a larger
hot tub, fresh paper for the powder room.
All night I wanted upgrades: stove, glasses,
On the first day of this year, I purchased a pair of midnight shoes. These are no island shoes, no hippies-take-‘em-off-at-the-door-protect-the-carpet shoes, chores-to-do shoes, no hitch-to-town-slipper, no drying-off-after-the-beach clog. No, these are the kind of shoes meant to make noise on urban concrete.
Continue reading… "Roadkill Rising"If you never learn them, facts cease to be
true, flatten like the sea before Aristotle,
confining you to local travel except for the few
who have always known the world is round
