accumulation of land maintain household bear labor of house child
cooking reserve line belonging to elaborate isolation
familias implements enemies captured in war bearing child rearing
production heirs number and rear household family contains
as freedom is a breakfastfood
or truth can live with right and wrong
or molehills are from mountains made
— long enough and just so long
will being pay the rent of seem
and genius please the talentgang
and water most encourage flame
as hatracks into peachtrees grow
or hopes dance best on bald men’ s hair
and every finger is a toe
and any courage is a fear
— long enough and just so long
will the impure think all things pure
and hornets wail by children stung
Begins in interruption:
an ambulance bell at the center
of sleep, the room tilts
sideways, furniture slides,
an octet of amber blue
verres à liqueur, one with a cut
at the lip, clatters as a quaalude
light in tatters mattes the
curtains ormolu:
I miss you
is what I want to say
like a rocket
stocked from the Reagan
years, its radar gone haywire,
wiring fried but
live inside a bunker of some
Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’ re beached and bloated, lie
on shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’ s Long Island, and the weather
is fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man?
A boy is not a body. A boy is a walk.
Shed the machine.
Must be entirely flesh to fight.
Must be strategy instead of filling.
Deeply repentant of my sinful ways
And of my trivial, manifold desires,
Of squandering, alas, these few brief days
Of fugitive life in tending love's vain fires,
To Thee, Lord, Who dost move hard hearts again,
And render warmth unto the frozen snow,
And lighten every bitter load of pain
For those who with Thy sacred ardours glow,
To Thee I turn, O stretch forth Thy right hand
And from this whirlpool rescue me, for I
Without Thine aid could never reach the land;
O willingly for us didst suffer loss,
Even with insects —
some can sing,
some can’ t.
Goes out,
comes back —
the love life of a cat.
Grayscale breath on a fluid
field, with lo-fi
rainpatter — petrol blue — ,
a 60-watt sun uns
-crewed from the
woebegone sky: rip-
rap & coal slurries,
dragline & loess, what phosphor
-us is a semaphore
for, silklike
in its acoustic shadows
He lived — childhood summers
thru bare feet
then years of money’ s lack
and heat
beside the river — out of flood
came his wood, dog,
woman, lost her, daughter —
prologue
to planting trees. He buried carp
beneath the rose
where grass-still
the marsh rail goes.
His father carved umbrella handles, but when umbrella
handles were made by machinery, there was only one
man for whom his father could work.
The pay was small, though it had once been a good trade.
They lived in the poorest part of the ghetto, near the lots
where people dump ashes.
His father was anxious that his son should stay at school and
get out of the mess he himself was in. “Learning is the
