Poems

The Poet

Out of the deep and the dark,

A sparkling mystery, a shape,

Something perfect,

Privacy

On the black wet branches of the linden,

still clinging to the umber leaves of late fall,

two crows land. They say, Stop, and still I want

to make them into something they are not.

Let’s Not Get It Together

The world has become corrupted

from our hearts

to the way our gods love us

as if they know they’re already dying

and they’re determined to drag us down with them

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

Fire in the Reeds

One night, fire fell into a reed bed

It burned like love falling onto a soul

As fire’s head warmed to its work

every reed turned into a candle at its own grave

The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

The New School

Do you remember, Nancy,

when we sat in the Creole restaurant

and glanced up at the television to see students running

with their hands in the air and photographs

of two young men?

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

Wrk

this job hates me

             this job wouldn’t make me feel so shitty if it didn’t

i’m nothing but nice to this job

but when this job is done with me it always sneaks out while

Helen

All Greece hates

the still eyes in the white face,

the lustre as of olives

The Trick

Let me be a ''poet of cripples" not

a patient etherized upon a table,

not a brain floating within a body.

In a moment I must be a body

in the place incision produces in a body,

The Lammergeier Daughter

That night, I opened your wardrobe and found

a trophy of vultures, their necks pierced

by hanger hooks. I saw at once

that you hunted everything I loved —

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling…

Prose Poem (“The morning coffee.”)

The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual

of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of

brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Poem of Failed Amends (Amor fati)

I’ve put the oats in a jar,

with yogourt and seeds,

left it in the fridge

overnight. The fruit on top

will thaw, dripping

sweetness

into the rest.

I want to remember

I’ve done this

Spacetime

We Twitter, Tinder, Tumblr through eternity. Loquacious

text messages flit from fingertips, waves of data spill

through our skulls. Every cm² of oxygen overflowing

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Come Up From the Fields Father

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn

Insomnia

If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,

bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room

with twelve locks on the door.

Thoughtless Cruelty

There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly — ,

And should you thousand ages try

The life you’ve taken to supply,

Parable of the Eagle

An eagle egg fell into a farmer’s chicken shed

and when it hatched the farmer gave it chicken feed

even though he was the king of birds. The farmer

clipped the eaglet’s princely beak and raised him

Shots Rang Out on My Street Today

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Shots rang out on my street today

Three Black yoots lay dead

shot inna dem head

With the Dying of the Light

I recited to him,

                      Now as I was young and easy,

and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,

Guanahani, 11

like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands

from under the clouds where I write the first poem

its brown warmth now that we recognize them

Villanelle

I dreamed I was reading a villanelle

in front of a crowd. Next to me on the floor

was a large bag of garbage I'd mistakenly

brought with me onto the stage. My own garbage.

Sons of Orion

for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.

I wanna live, son. But which son are you?

   There where the rivers are made

of moonshine and the lights still wait,

Vancouver Lights

About me the night        moonless           wimples the mountains

wraps ocean      land    …

Catastrophe That Nearly Brought Down a Plane

After late-night Li Bo,

on a plane to Houston, out of sheer intumescence

I begin unravelling a sickness bag—

starting with the wired throat,

then the pleated sides, then bottom.

aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?

        bedtime ritual     summon a stranger     tonight you

linger on my laptop screen

Eclipse

In every which way, I am living

for potential. I’ve mined cadmium

enough to roulette with Death

and Mars, bloodshot brute,

is swollen in my honour.

My function is action —

to pummel through concrete

Holy Beings

on the day the chief of kâ-awâsis announces they have confirmed 751

bodies in unmarked graves outside the residential “school” in their

community, i google things like:

Jesse’s Farm

We’re driving and the radio says mass marine extinctions within a

generation. No silence, no sirens — an unflustered inflection, then

stock markets, cryptic as Latin mass. I force myself: the interval

The Fish

wade

through black jade.

   Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps