This is the angle of explanation: Because I always boomerang back to you, I know the figure of your desires, how coming close is a crash landing into closed hands, how leaving is a giveaway ending. Blue is such a small word for feeling. The other day sparkling in memory, but dull in fact. You
With Othello in the trees and Viola waiting in the wing, the tourist train came steaming, its belly announcing its arrival. The turn of words could not be interrupted, but our attention, subverted, snapped into this year. We almost slipped on future plans, and how and why and what to accomplish before we die, before
Every 15 minutes. That’s how often they came in my locked room at night with their flashlights shining in my face to make sure I was still alive. Nighttime was OK. The screams were minimal. The day was something else altogether. Like I have been doing recently, one of them was doing everything possible to
GREENSPOT (I’ll never wear anything green as long as I live) in front of the searchlight Hanoi static loud and clear on the radio on top of the sandbag bunker reading playboy after dark not to be swapped even for Bangkok R-n-R in the middle of the goddamn jungle waiting for ink to melt off
PURPOSE OF MEMORY (Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Kuwait) something to drink to to drink for the pieces of time that hang on like flesh in the bars stateside where if you listen you’ll hear them remembering the loudest have nothing to say
It’s summer. Our dusty orb revolves slowly on its axis, angled into sunslant for maximum absorption; its thin, dark skin blisters and cracks. All day I stand idle, waiting once again for magic to tumble into my life–the mythical poor fisher who nets a spangled, articulate carp, is granted three wishes–some jar or cache pot
I mean, a thistle among roses appears a rude thing, slow, cloddish country cousin who visits, whose awkward manners do not fit–you apologize, make excuses, feel mild embarrassment. Then, place that same thistle atop a peck of turnips. No longer simple produce, it becomes beautiful, a still life, rich purple blossom echoed in tints upon
It was supposed to be January because it’s always January in the folktales, because a hoary landscape gives the icy crunch, the frozen leaf, the piper’s footprints along the road, a mailbox row hemmed in by snow. So much exists just beyond the Sunday clinging to a wet branch, sharp spikes glisten in the Alaskan
Though it looks so different it still feels like home to me where you and I used to play, getting lost in our imagination day after day while mother worried. And John there with us, talking of friends getting shot in the leg, the marsh fire (claiming he wasn’t there that day), and the
I remember the dress, red and white and swollen with expectant child. I remember the bench, ordinary meaningless bench, but I remember its rough nothingness like yesterday and how I kicked at the stones, afraid to look into the eyes of goodbye. I remember the river, sad twinkling past in easy rhythm always coming… always
