THE WOVEN MESSAGE come hide near me I’ll count however long I need to count the insects in the web— I like the still living ones—that beat of wing I hear or the still turned-on ignition of the firefly—I see one’s underbelly blink on and off—come hide near me, somewhere in this wild…
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SELF-PORTRAIT I did not want my body Spackled in the world’s Black beads and broke Diamonds. What the world Wanted, I did not. Of the things It wanted. The body of Sunday Morning, the warm wine and The blood. The dripping fox Furs dragged through the black New York snow—the parked car, the…
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/ You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted…
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THE INEVITABLE To have that letter arrive was like the mist that took a meadow and revealed hundreds of small webs once invisible The inevitable often stands by plainly but unnoticed till it hands you a letter that says death and you notice the weed field had been readying its many damp handkerchiefs…
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BURIAL You’re right, you’re right, the fertilizer’s good— it wasn’t a gang of dullards came up with chucking a fish in the planting hole or some midwife got lucky with the placenta— oh, I’ll plant a tree here!— and a sudden flush of quince and jam enough for months—yes, the magic dust our…
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CAPGUN Imagine a boy holding a capgun. Now, instead of a boy, imagine a man holding a portrait of a boy with a capgun. There’s an orange tip painted on the end of his assault rifle. It’s okay, it just looks fake, it’s actually quite real. Later the boy will grow up, get…
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THE PRIVILEGE OF BEING Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy— it must look to them like…
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LADYBIRDS Brilliance is a carcass on a snow-white beach. Envy never sleeps. I tell my children truthfully: a long red beard is breaking from the darkness scale. He’s chasing you because you’re new. Because he’s old and sees the town in dirty tones: violet sheep and wine-dark corn. He burns the evening rainbow…
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TROMBONE There were carols on the kitchen radio, a late cold night, entering the room while straightening the blistered Navajo rug, I remembered suddenly what the first eight notes of hark, the herald angels sing felt like vibrating through my body that first time— I was eleven and unprepared, I remembered when I…
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THE MOON’S HIND LEGS The moon’s hind legs are invisible. Its bastard ear-boring cry is only fully heard by infants. Bright as the starchy pharmacist’s coat, its objective is to illuminate the puddled glass replacing someone’s stolen vehicle, the tuft of fur in the barbed wire. Some nights it shivers as though it…
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