Free Verse

Note Held

“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming,
linoleum flecked with flame,
a thick coat of wax that flashed
down a corridor and led to a room,
a place where I curled up a few
innocuous inches off the floor.
Straps — word out of strophe,
the restraints of line and stanza —
straps hung in loops on closet hooks.
On the nightstand a basket with
peanut butter crackers, a vivid
and unnatural orange, a crinkly
wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked
with icy juices, foil boxes, straws
glued on. A female voice next door

from Letter in April: VII

On the street
with our money
clutched
in our hands,
buying bread
and scattering breadcrumbs
for the bluish
doves.
Paying
to see
the fire eater,
the cigarette swallower
and the dead vagabond
who breathes.
Greeting
the palm tree
that sighs
at night.
Saying a few words
to the staring
stone figure
above the gate.
Laughing
and rushing
in
as if chased.
In the cool kitchen
we prepare
and arrange our food.

Things We Dreamt We Died For

Flags of all sorts.
The literary life.
Each time we dreamt we’ d done
the gentlemanly thing,
covering our causes
in closets full of bones
to remove ourselves forever
from dearest possibilities,
the old weapons re-injured us,
the old armies conscripted us,
and we gave in to getting even,
a little less like us
if a lot less like others.
Many, thus, gained fame

“The Decay of ancient knowledge”

To cure a child of rickets, split a living
ash tree down its length and pass
the child through
(naked, headfirst, three times).
Seal the two halves of the tree back up
and bind them with loam and black
thread. If the tree heals, so will the child.
(The child must also be washed
for three mornings in the dew
of the chosen tree.)

Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin Another

All my stories are about being left,
all yours about leaving. So we should have known.
Should have known to leave well enough alone;
we knew, and we didn’ t. You said let’ s put
our cards on the table, your card
was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’ t
get till 4 am, so tired from wanting
what we shouldn’ t that when we finally found our heads,
we’ d lost our minds. Love, I wanted to call you
so fast. But so slow you could taste each
letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear.

The Llano Estacado

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?
If you’ re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:
a sky’ s worth. Some even sow the dry playa
mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under
after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps
an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard.
Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,
no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.

Orpheus

He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed
in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes,
the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips
and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression
of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill
she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him

Problems of Knowledge

Translation broadens language
as divorce and remarriage extend family.

Born to fade and break, facts
huddle inside black brackets.

Work means inquisition as a child
separates a cricket’ s wings from thorax.

Ideas come apart as monads, metastasizing
rhapsody on the edge of delicate dusk.

Thunder sounds in the distance or television,
always on in this constant rain.

The Key to the Kingdom

It's not exile, homes and families behind
us, where we meet. It happens anywhere,
now: a stateless
state of no name, quietly seceding
from the crumbling empires round us,

without stamps or Eurovision entries.
No-one does it with a rough guide in a week.
You inhabit it
or nothing. Like this: in a pavement cafe
you blink and you seem to surprise them,

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