Poetry |
“Reading One of Wright’s Notebooks” and “Heat Waiver”
“The clouds, a marriage / of mirages. // There’s an argument / to be had. / Close at hand.”
Poetry |
“A Yellow Cab Driver”
“Then I think of my mother and the nights / she crab-walked home after peeing herself behind the wheel. / She couldn’t find a toilet on the clock.”
Poetry |
“Music Box,” “Maya Miller” & “Clever Dress”
“On the part that opens, there’s a mirror. / I am not a music box, even though / I am a box shaped like music. / The music you have to imagine.”
Poetry |
“Gaza And Jerusalem: A Triptych”
“Worlds / reassemble / in our minds, these / sides of the line. / Tell us where / and we’ll put / them there.”
Poetry |
“Watching”
“When a wave hit — / it shook its head, / biting the air. // When two swans passed by, / they looked whiter / than usual.”
Poetry |
“The Young Herdsman,” “Pastoral (Eclogue)” & “My Manifest”
“… and in more time / each summer once the heat is broken by the pine / spare parts become common, and to include them / commonplace …”
Poetry |
“Dispatch,” “Reflexive,” “Monumental Life Building” & “saw, circular”
“The teacher told me / my heart was roughly / the size of my fist // and I saw my hand / clench around / the new knowledge …”
Poetry |
“Meditation on Comprehension,” “Meditation on Direction,” “Octet” & “Looking at Cy Twombly’s Cold Stream and Feeling The Heat”
“The line, / like the river, / does not know to stop. / Nothing on this earth is straight —/ not the sky, the sea, the self, the stream — “
Poetry |
“Breaking,” “Once Upon A …,” & “Sumatra Wharf”
“… but this boundlessness breaks the spell of confinement, / vast and vaster and all the things you ever saw, / or held in your hands or thought or said, / will remain unspoken, / because they haven’t taken place.”
Poetry |
“Middle School,” “Metamorphosis,” “Persephone’s Friends” & “Metamorphosis”
“They cropped her // Out of images and didn’t say her name / Except to agree she never really was // That great a friend and maybe she was / Asking for it braless in that tank top.”
Poetry |
“Literal,” “What Is That Song You Sing for the Dead?” & “Last Ocean”
“She wanted to see the comet that appears only every seventy-five / years because she knew she wouldn’t be alive the next time. / She said, I think that’s it, and pointed up — the whole-note stars, / the yard beneath muddy and humming.”
Poetry |
“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” “Verbal Alchemy,” “Oh Muse” & “Decreation”
“This sweet yearning to spark // with the word the depths of the dark. / Make gold from nothing but the vital name / and let the rest go up in smoke.”
Poetry |
“W. G. Sebald’s Last Walk”
“But a return to / Footsteps in chalky / Sand // Recalling vestigium / Meant trace or / Footstep”
Poetry |
“First Miracle,” “The Kind Stepmother” and “May Snow”
“I wanted everyone / to be unhappy, / like Grandfather Lenin who, obviously, wanted / everyone to be happy, / for when all is said and done we wanted the same thing: / fairness …”
Poetry |
“Smoke Day”
“There’s a saying about time when everything is on fire. / The morning entirely blue except one pink slash right where it all starts up.”