Free Verse

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line —
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,

To think I used to be so good at going to pieces
gobbling my way through the cops

and spooking what’ s left of the girls. How’ d I

get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time,
jerking my mossy pelt along

ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds

when we stacked our futile selves
against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans!

Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit

of looted malls, plastered with tattered
flags of useless currency, I’ d slobbered all over

For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory
smears across the squalor of a boundlessly

unhygienic sky. You’ d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them
with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box

technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying
to wipe down the universe. You’ d say

I tug at God’ s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers

of a coward. You’ d confide to your diary my eyelashes
don’ t bat sootily enough. Such a lummox

The process of through is ongoing.

The earth doesn’ t seem to move, but sometimes we fall
down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning.

We were just going. I was just leaving,
which is to say, coming
elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words
move through my limbs, lungs, mouth, as I appear to sit

“Would you mind
If I headed up early?”
Says the husband
To his young wife.
“Follow when you like.”

Later that evening
The beautiful face
And exquisite limbs
Will rise from the table
Of the Southern inn
Having been spied
By the antihero
Across the room
Reading an indifferent book.

Oh, quick —
Let a storm kill the light!

But you might as well say it
To a wall.
We can’ t change
A single
Silver setting, or
Even by one day
Reduce
The bright full moon.

In a famous painting of a founding father
and the back end of a horse

it’ s the horse butt that’ s properly lit
groomed out smooth an immortal peach

Who can say what it means about revolution
that the horse’ s tail emerges as though it had no bones in it

no chunky mechanics of the living
And the horse is not well muscled

but has been living in the rich grass
swollen like a birthday balloon

You love your friend, so you fly across the country to see her.

Your friend is grieving. When you look at her, you see that something’ s missing.

You look again. She seems all there: reading glasses, sarcasm, leather pumps.

What did you expect? Ruins? Demeter without arms in the British Museum?

Your friend says she believes there’ s more pain than beauty in the world.

When Persephone was taken, Demeter damned the world for half the year.

The other half remained warm and bountiful; the Greeks loved symmetry.

That she was not pretty she knew.

The flowers delivered into her hands post-concert by the young girl, pretty, would be acknowledged only. To display was to invite comparison.

Skilled at withholding, she withheld; it was a kind of giving. As when meditation is a kind of action,

a way of leaning into music the way one leans into winter wind, the way a mule leans into a harness,

the way a lover leans into the point of deepest penetration.

After a ship’ s prow cuts the water, the water rushes back twice as hard.

Netflix the Green Man and any screen
becomes a vineyard. Episodes cluster
and climb, trellis narrative. Between
the corn and lichen, creepers muster

nine lives. They grow, divide, and splice,
steal scenes by running fox grape, bittersweet,
return on any handheld device
as moonseed, woodbine, dodder, buckwheat —

false buckwheat — note, though star- and heart-shaped.
He trucks some mascot for our kids, glad-hands
a sidekick dressed to burrow, root, and take
them through their lessons rattling dad’ s

We enrolled at barbizon
Knowing full well
We’ d never look like
What was promised
Cue carol of the bells
Cue a demo on the casio
And the security of two-way
Escalators setting the speed
Those early mornings
In our mall school
The store’ s silver grills
Some mannequins left
Half-clothed
We’ d taunt them
With our imagined summers
In london paris rome
We weren’ t please and thank you
Walking with books on our heads
No we were going to devastate
Greek shipping heirs