Poetry |
“Ferryboats”
“If you don’t like your story, drop it in, / and if the waves don’t smooth it clean, then nothing will: / sweeping off each broken word in salty swells …”
Poetry |
“A Monk After Dark,” “Haze” & “The Poet’s Indolence”
“In earliest spring, he’d look for better, say, than melting. // The winter hardwoods would deserve more than naked. / In summer, he’d need to allow green frogs to do more than twang.”
Poetry |
“ICU” and “Asked for a Voice Recording”
“Now I could rub off / as easily as scales / from a moth’s wing / and he wants to know / what makes up my mind.”
Poetry |
“Hexagon-Tiled Bathroom Floor”
“we’ve met before, you and your thousand / sisters close as thin-walled honeycomb, / bathroom floor the little theater of childhood …”
Poetry |
“Cleaning Up” and “Message From David”
“I wash the dishes / and think about the little girl / in the ad who says, ‘What / does the dishwasher do?'”
Poetry |
“What Do You Make of That?” “We All Know We Don’t Have Enough Lifeboats” & “Autumn, Mississippi”
“I am watching my country point / to its own dying body and yell Hoax! / Always, everyone is predictable — the practiced / defenses, the war metaphors …”
Poetry |
“Praying inside the emergency”
“I pray because // I can’t bend social orders / let alone my own diminutive life / to my will, and I have bent so hard / that I broke myself …”
Poetry |
“MMXX”
“From their scrubbed and bleached / houses, children peer through fingered sunblinds / at all the stony statesmen and sovereigns / falling down …”
Poetry |
“Poem Obscured By Sleep and Fog,” “After the Children Have Grown” & “One Kind of Waiting”
“Her biology homework is done, diagrams of cell walls drawn in purple ink. Soon enough, she carries her backpack into the darkness, into the fog, past the field which wants nothing, not even sun on its lovely slim grasses …”
Poetry |
“The Sutton Hoo Helmet”
“Behold its seams all split. Behold / the human shape that any head might fit.”