Poetry
A collection of original poems.
Gowpen & Undertow
Paper Birds at the Crosswalk
Equilibrio Instabile
Observance
Swimming
Leadore
The Word Made Flesh
With Every Classmate I’ve Lost, I Feel like I’ve Failed a Test
Inflection Point
Here To There
A Conversation with Salvator Rosa
The Poet as Thief
“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.” — Arthur Rimbaud Was Prometheus a poet? Rimbaud says he was, stealing fire from the gods: technology, knowledge, human arts and sciences. He paid a terrible price for his audacity. Whatever was he thinking? Look what we have done with what he gave
Three States Triptych
The 7th Burial Mound
The Forty-Ninth Year
Unraveling
Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)
Live from the Hadal Zone
Grace
Animal Instinct
Today a Cooper’s Hawk perched itself outside our bedroom window on a low branch of a small tree not twenty feet away. The courtyard of our condo complex. Frequented by all sorts of wildlife: sparrows and wrens, mourning doves, juncos, hummingbirds, now and then a cardinal, chipmunks, rabbits, lots
Wonder Me
Orchard Season
Pray Silence (The Mind of the Meeting)
Three Elegies for the Everyday
FLATLAND
In the Valles Caldera
Bubble of Loneliness
Ancient Cooperation
Easter Plum
Pistachios
Ars Poetica: or, Benzaitan’s Rules for Poems (That She Told Me In A Dream)
Dream Person
The Morning News
Heat of a Bayou
Dämmerschlaf, or, Twilight Sleep
What You Could Not Spare
Emergency Room
Not Quite Touching Sestos
A Silencing
Crepe Myrtles
Deny Your Surface Self
Văcărești
I Wake Up Daily Which Cannot Continue Forever.
How to Write a Poem
While We Were in Motion
Exit Terra
Porschegasbord
In Search of Dreams
At the Cardiologist’s
Mystifying Answers to Magic 8 Ball Questions Regarding Recent Political Events
Bad Angel's Home
Solaria
An Alternate Ending
Gilgandra, 1963
Words Unheard
Summer in the Mountains
Haberdasher
Mother-in-Law
Stealing Baby Jesus
The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
Ice Skating on Lake Estancia
Shahuhude (Foolish)
The Teacher Retires
The Sound of Silence
Like a Rock
Cheers
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
At Woodlawn
Three Haiku
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
The Discarded
Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
Indigo Goodbyes
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
The Ficus Frost
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
Melodic Dream of Attic
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
A Chapel
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
The Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
Public Education
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
Daisy Chain
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
Overpass to Memphis
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
The Bells, on Evening Paths
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
Perfect Paradox
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
The Worst of Our Fathers
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
My Best Friend’s Sugar Daddy
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
Miscalculated
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
Observance, 2022
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
Saints
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
Night Stalkers
I Thought I’d Live ‘til Ninety-five
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
Asterisk*
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
The Wake
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
Moth
“The city never sleeps: the isle of faces illuminated by cell phones/is proof its waking isn’t rising, only beeping, only static,/only the cashier in the convenience store, only flickering.”
Nostalgia
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier
Witness. Target = Rubble
“We thought there couldn’t be anything more./But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods./Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.”
Bruises Bloom Roses
“Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.”
A Woodpecker Pecks
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
Villa 351
“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”
Hands Together Ghazal
“Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.”
The Treachery of Poetry
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) I imagine them in mud, steaming people, bony hands joined to the land, farming with fingers clawing furrows in the earth, dreaming of rain. Someone begat someone who begat someone, who begat someone else (etc) then you and I
Moon Bloom and Lithopedion
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
Down at the Ecoplex
“Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.”