up a little,” he says,
shutting the rusted tailgate,
“maybe at least lean
down from your high horse
and look busy,” picking up
his work gloves and his spade.
“You’ re not the only
hick on the clock
with an education,” he says, half-
laughing, half-wheezing,
and spits, his bottom lip bulging
with a load of Skoal,“even
if you do think pretty highly
of your poetry.”
In the middle of December
to start over
to assume again
an order
at the end
of wonder
to conjure
and then to keep
slow dirty sleet
within its streetlight
the plates are broken after just one meal:
plates that mimic lily pads or horseshoe crabs,
swifts’ wings,
golden koi, whirlpools, blowholes in rictus:
all smashed against the table’ s edge —
... also our chef eschews pepper & salt
for violets & vespers
& squid ink & honey from wasps
rare lichen grown in local snow
authentic silt dark from the Nile or Tigris.
On the radio this morning: The average woman knows
275 colors — and men know eight. Women say coffee,
mocha, copper, cinnamon, taupe. Men say brown.
Women know an Amazon of colors I might have said
were green, an Antarctica of whites, oceans of colors
I'd stupidly call blue, fields of color, with flowers in them
I would have said were red.
I find it helpful to imagine writing in a blizzard
with every inscription
designed to prevent snow
crystals from drifting in.
Avoid the hive mind. Go fly a kite,
raise a stained glass window in the sky.
It’ s the opposite of making love to drudgery,
what I do for a dying.
Remove the bitter sediment
trapped in the brewer. It will be new
whether you make it new
or not. It will be full of neo-
This time I’ m not going to say a thing
about deity. It’ s not the blizzard,
it’ s three days after. Trinkle from thawing
roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.
Ruin, I promise, won’ t be mentioned again.
Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split
to the bole but this isn’ t about the chainsaw.
A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets
and then Tony showed us the lake
where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer
and it had dissolved like powder
so he thought maybe the lake could take
some of the radiant, aluminum kind
he had been making lately.
And it did.
It was a perfect lake,
none of the paint had chipped off,
no bolts showing, the arms that Dante
Is everything a field of energy caused
by human projection? From the crib bars
hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed
desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts
surrounds the soccer field of what if.
Sometimes it seems like a world where no one
knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes
both directions. How about a polymer
Like everyone, I wanted my animal
to be the hawk.
I thought I wanted the strength
to eat the eyes first then tear
into the fuse box of the chest
and soar away.
I needed help because I still
cowered under the shadow of my father,
a man who inspected picture tubes
five out of seven nights,
We cannot push ourselves away
from this quiet, even in our sprees
of inattention, the departing passengers
stubbing out their smokes, arrivees in tears,
lots of cellophane, the rumpus over parking.
