poem

Fault

Fault

We glide into the room to sit
In high-backed chairs and slide the plate
Across a line. We shift a bit

To face our food, lurch, hesitate,
Suspended at a table where
Fixed, unconvenable we wait.

Inseparable, this weight we bear
Yet stubbornly we subdivide,
Recalculate the other’s share

Boxed Crab

Boxed Crab

When Morning Comes

When Morning Comes

For My Father

For My Father

           ‘ . . . discord which has ripped
           you from your father, stripped
           away known places, play and friends . . .’
                   – Andrew Waterman, ‘For My Son’

 

What Passing Bells

What Passing Bells

A policeman blocks the road so I stop
and tut and tap the wheel and find a sweet
and scrape it through its wrapper with my teeth.
More cars stop. Then bright rustling up the street
from snare drums and some reedy trumpet-calls
remind us all what day it is. In front

Lust Redeems Her Car from the Parking Valet

Lust Redeems Her Car from the Parking Valet

Myself in an Old Photograph

Myself in an Old Photograph

That was the day.  This is the final record,
me before the change.  It’s fantasy
to search out the expression of a word
in lips still motionless—how can I hope
to read a cheek’s subtext, identify
exactly the pigment, shadow, line or shape,
the gaze’s drift, the impossible unblurred
flicker of anguish in a printed eye
that means I did not know, but I would learn.
Nobody can be loved on his own terms.

Across a Crowded Room

Across a Crowded Room

Chimborazo Hospital

Chimborazo Hospital

           (after the Battles of the Seven Days)

Nothing but Blue

Nothing but Blue

Thoreau calls the merlin
a tenant of the air
but such a metaphor
requires clouds—nesting place
for almost weightless wings,
the swooping heart and eye
that know the sky. Too bad
this morning’s spotless reach
of blue above the pines
suggests no fanciful
boarding house for bob-whites,
no breezy porch to perch
a speckled thought.

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