Poems

1992

This is our welfare half

a duplex with mint green

siding shrugged between

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

to wait outside the gate. I arrived on time,

the time we had agreed on and waited, as agreed,

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles 

Over a groove. The other slushes chords.

Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.

Francesca Woodman

i

At the heart there is a hollow sun

by  which  we  are constructed  and undone

The Novel As Manuscript

An ars poetica

I remember the death, in Russia,

of postage stamps

Ae Fond Kiss

Tune: Rory Dall’s Port

First printed in Johnson’s S.M.M., Vol. 4, 13th August 1792.

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;                          …

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki         frog

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words,                        …

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

1

an urban image from the eighties

when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur

Hip-Hop Ghazal

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,

St John’s Burns Down for the Umpteenth Time

Let’s say the fix was in. Let’s say history,
Being human and thus short on ideas,
Made change from an old bag of tricks. Say this

4 Marked by Claws and Cloudburst...

The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June. 

180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil 

   …

You Are Not Going to Come Trillium

But I do come to Trillium. To the Cardiac
Short Stay Unit where you’ve been sent for the second stent, 
where free sanitizer prevents the spread of panic.

What Is Poetry

(a twelve-tone poem)

trite yap show

rosy twit heap

Poem For Duncan Campbell Scott

Who is this black coat and tie?

Christian severity etched in the lines

he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man

who believes in work and mission. See

how he rises from the red velvet chair,

Porphyria’s Lover

The rain set early in to-night,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

A Thousand Martyrs

A thousand martyrs I have made,

All sacrific’d to my desire;

A thousand beauties have betray’d,

Hotel Centrale, Rotterdam

I am awake between stiff

sheets tonight in room thirty

four, listening to the heat

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki 

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words,

If Stone Dreams

We cannot know this statue, this satyr 

with his head propped on a wineskin; 

we cannot know if he dreams. In fact, 

I Feel the Sun

Down a long, long corridor 

I keep walking… 

—A window straight ahead so bright it hurts the eyes, 

Cowboy Story

The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients

in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn

and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.

All About My Grandmother

Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother

to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,

beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,

Kay in Summer

Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid

the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf

might see it all as too hesitant for truth

Common Magic

Your best friend falls in love

and her brain turns to water.

You can watch her lips move,

mixed tape

side a:

1. 18 and Life

her friend takes her to

Sonoma

He totaled his blue truck — 

slowly spun out on an icy bridge, 

rammed it into a guard rail. 

The Boxers

We were combatants from the start. Our dad 

Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten — 

Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius 

World Town

Entirely windless, today’s sea; of these waters’ many names

the best seemed “field-of-pearl-leaves,” for it smelled like the air

in the house he built entirely of doors: pink school door,

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

We can never be with loss too long.

Behind the warped door that sticks,

the wood thrush calls to the monks,

from Citizen

The rain this morning pours from the gutters and 

everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your 

glasses to single out what you know is there because 

Chemo Side Effects: Memory

Where is the word I want?

Groping

in the thicket,

I’ve Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

Sun Bear

yesterday at the Oakland zoo

I was walking alone for a moment

past the enclosure holding the sun bear

world shapers

creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups

they remind us of all the possible ways & means

that worlds…

i am graffiti

i am writing to tell you

that yes, indeed,

we have noticed

Modestine

We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James, 

who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the

Cévennes

Dream Jobs

Random Link Clicker.

Royal Bath Taker.

Receiver of Foot Rubs and Praise.

Five Postcards from Jericho

Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of

…

71. Song for a Silent Treatment.

I told her, in plain language, how I felt. 

And by that I mean I mumbled a poorly 

paraphrased and…