Some Poems
from:
Welcome Fog
Impact, shaken as in a toy car, holy
shit. The apprehension of unseen damage.
Seat-belted, breathing deep, curbing hard
and parking. Nothing I could point to, yet.
…
Scoured down to the bedrock
once in an ice age or so.
Uplands, a byway. Half collapsed,
a farmhouse, set back from the road.
The crockery of loss, inferred.
…
Mediocre writers who pass their entire lives
reading other mediocre writers (he said to me)
read practically nothing else
and for no reason other than to reassure themselves
that mediocre writing is readable,
and therefore worthwhile.
A night breeze rustling the willows.
Whisky has me stargazing,
I try identifying planets,
that’s Venus, nearest, Queen of the Sky.
…
While passing through, a splurge
without occasion at the Casa Del Mar.
Cocktails by the pool. There, and there,
such women, in their notional outfits,
upwelling in the heart.
…
In a certain forest there was a great sage.
Seeing this extraordinary being,
a hunter approached and said,
‘O sage, a deer wounded by my arrow
ran by here. Tell me which way it went.’
…
from:
The Orphans and other poems
Blizzards, thaw, blizzards,
yet all this even-handedness about us,
possibly delusion,
shy of absolutes. Cleft vision.
…
Anicius Boethius wrote De consolatione
in prison, charged with conspiracy.
It’s thought that he was executed not long after,
in Pavia, place of his exile,
circa 524 CE.
…
Always the hope at the last
or else call it knowledge,
that through imperfection
the saving power arrives.
…
Somehow the difference
between imagining things
and actually seeing them,
compared to the gulf
that separates the living and the dead
…
After a hurried food court lunch
I loiter at the newsstand,
one of several office workers
who crowd this ledge of day
…
It escapes us, the question
concerning technology,
Aladdin’s problem, who couldn’t
get the genie back
down in the lamp. Titanic.
…