Collection of Poems
Current as of February 2019
BLOOD
Everything red has some of its properties
carnelian alizarin a lake like other lakes
translucent and fugitive
After muskets armorers made gates and hardware
Running for our lives became track & field
Civility among the warlike never caught on
as did bathing in flags and fabrications
ritually dipping an arrow to remind the shaft
of its purpose
- from Blackbird
THE HIDDEN
There are moons in me
I have seen the x-rays
I glow with that light
Until the hidden was revealed
the lush given was an ecstasy
tempered by caution like hawks
crossing water
We have limited capacity
so we say infinite and think
we have described something
our shorthand for what is
beyond us
When asked why birding
Ellen said because
they let us see them
-Post Road
OUTVOTED
Governments are systems in which no virtue is perfected
no innocence preserved Once the Yanomamo met outsidrs
they began planning their survival This is inevitable
In every such discovery everyone will eventually have to dress
in their feathers and fly in a winged horse to the capitol to ask
for justice The pleadings will demonstrate how the roots
of the manioc have been damaged the disappearance of animals
and the silting of streams was like blood withdrawing from the body
Those with no trees and not enough parking will find the metaphors quaint
-Subtropics
VIGNETTE
There is a heartbreaking earnestness to life
On the midway a man was selling chameleons
He had many on strings pinned to his vest
It was Royal Stewart plaid They were trying
-The Literary Review
KOI
Koi converse in slow circles
of what we have not seen
Mercy
and the dark bottom of the pond
The recirculating pump we call
karma
is only a sound and mysterious
as well being
A comforting surrounding
to lives of endless destinations
-The Nation
POSSESSION
The poem started long before you got here
how far it can go and what will be left
after death and revisions is being decided
I have begun to misremember the room
and the date how far a rose from a rifle
pillow from the dream whose intensity
was outside the region of visible light
An evening without flies and no mosquitos
the sun once bell high now tone deaf
down behind the reservoir a sign of rushing
into the narrows that perspective is
What we are used to has a long history
Lights come on in the brilliant machinery
a frieze of wisteria juggling the sun’s small hands
We remember through our belongings
till all the apostrophes are gone
-The Gettysburg Review