Category Archives: poetry

some see the virtue of drowning
faithfully like Jonah
thighs pressed together
in the fin and rib of things
cramped where tongues bloom
muscles tense like November trees
curving downward into moist blades
with just enough left for their desires
to be strapped to the back
still singing loudly
and overhanging like cattle

they do not obey language
like an SOS from
poorly healed stitches
buried in the viscera
only a bonfire of redwood
in the oilfields
can make them look down
can make them feel
the engine entering them
with eyes like elevators
inlaid bent and perverse

all along their bottle capped horizon
wearing their shirts untucked
singing falala songs
to buzz their hard won
southbound lives
they hurry along
hoping to curate
some kind of armature
or refrigeration system
made of steam
and the better kinds
of softwood

I don’t need
their winter curse
from a time gone by
even silence
turns on its rails
staying clear
of the painters easel
so it goes the windows
of the school
the oldest of all griefs
harder than boxwood

a nectarine
and voices
clear as water
with a torn piece
leaf by leaf
woven into bluish lenses
and the gritty white ruins
of an Oklahoma prison
that held Clyde Barrow
that nobody visits

from these animal bones
children live in private gardens
laughing and naked
running with red hands

I’m guessing the solitude
shuffles where the boy
defecates in the dirt
under the porch
his bronze body
never again less
incurable than now

some are snags
bare as chalk
some conspire
to make noises among others
full of hooks and ministers
a flash of criminals

where a girl is walking
a fragrance of hips
smoothes out time
lines and ruts
cut into her school desk
far from profound
say things will remain
all the numbers and letters
stretch out beyond the heat plant
towards the winery
like copper trees at dawn

no balm in gilead
just a rollaboard suitcase
in the carousel
at the airport terminal
our secret decay
fills the gaps
in the paraphrase of faces
before words can

maybe Charles Lindbergh’s
only mistake was
he wasn’t a mistake
or Michelangelo
only a boy
carelessly bronzed
over time

a frazzled thief in the burn
she came delivered to glad

disorganized and knobbed
and reaching up short

a lost wax casting
a mecca of bones in bright drapery

come and lose this she said
ride the raves the light ball ends

guitars and thin nickel strings
and rumored fathers

in this skinny hour of forenoon
couldn’t want more

a bobcat with a dark spotted neck
would leap upon the gain

only from courtesy
I must keep you dead, she said

as radiation in the mouth and spine
humanized acid; arctic life

a lover knows to pass through
the gorge and along the ledge

sharp as one degree of arc-tangent
and on the summit of high nakedness

take the testimony
of a lossy heart