You See My Arms Open
I say this before all that is your world: a fortress-fiefdom in Sweden, blue bull tracks threading autumn, one who needs proofs to love, the puppet plays of Chikamatsu, stone breakers in weatherproof boots. You see, I become nothing but a gravitational collapse in time’s cracked rigging-shells, an ice crystal sleeping with uncertainty a kitchen god nestling in the void, or a river flowing into a nethermost wind until I am with you. So, you eater of ashes, fling those proofs aside and open your mind too long asleep with death, learn to breathe the way love sets free in...
Read MoreMy Second Half-Century
The slop of another new year lies down in the yard, pale and hungover. Wet in the arms of the last snow, the new year squats in soft, muddy grass, taking the place of our three snowmen who melted, fell, and exist only as a handful of white torso in the rain. I enter my second half-century the same way. As parts of me vanish without warning, the days feel loaded, hours ticking me off. It’s January and the radio predicts thunderstorms later tonight. Maybe the new year will stand up to the lightning and pouring rain, shake itself...
Read MoreMy Brave Mexican Girl
She walks across a desert on fire head held high in the flames like homicidal poppies advancing over the mesa, over the milkweed and the cacti boiling sap. Smoke cancers the sky like a hell-cloud inhaling: smell the burning hair of the cholla and the down of the owl’s clover, see that death is indigenous, feel the heat of the melting anemone, the snapdragon’s hope, the broomrape’s pride and the wind whipping in the scorpion weed… The desert burns...
Read More“Where are you going? Michael. Michael.”
In the car on the way home after dropping Linda off at the Ferry, my wife begins to complain about me again, one of those harpies eating the liver out of my chest, telling me that I talk about her all the time, even the children said I talk about her too much, and I relate everything to her and she’s sick of it, and she explains that at Mystic Seaport she took my camera away because I was taking too many pictures of her. “I feel like you’re burying me,” she says, “It’s like I’m already dead.” Such a terrible thing to say to me. I...
Read MoreSunflowers (Triolet)
blue sky folds into grey shadow while neon signs brightly glitter a singer’s voice fades to low blue sky folds into grey shadow the diners get ready to go and the air becomes acrid, bitter blue sky folds into grey shadow while neon signs brightly glitter Wild Transitions...
Read MoreBetween your two weakest fingers
Between your two weakest fingers the quarter slips, your wish drowning half in moonlight half held down by your arm –you’ve got an hour in a meter clogged with ancient lakes and marrow with wings seeping through the altitude where north stays stranded in your bones juts from the curb and a little water for your heart –with the first handshake you will forget again, your wrist towed from beside some motionless glass filled where nothing else is thirsty. Wild Transitions...
Read More