I saw this man wearing a sign today on 42nd street and he reminded me of you how you would have Loved him and all the people who never looked up You’d say– Maybe the guy behind him is texting his wife can’t wait for Colorado Maybe the fella to the right is meeting an…
Leap from your structures There are animals down there clinging to rock canvas as old as God Leave the dishes The clothes on the floor The wine in the bottle Your nocturnal predator needs her beauty sleep too Open all the windows Do you see it now? I do There’s a sun ball on your…
Mary asked good questions. The kind only a woman thinks. Do I see you with my soul or with my spirit? He smiled. The deep kind that starts in the eye. Neither. It’s your mind, Miriam, the space between the two. She chewed on that awhile, holding the weight of her hair at the top…
Just a little Love tonight from the Oregon coast and my first Lover, William Wordsworth. As a little girl, I remember stealing from my mother’s book shelf, stacks of classic romantics. But William was the first theft. He and I conceived my passion for books. Real books. From the ornamented bindings, the textured ink, the…
It came in through the front door a dense, black body and paper wings crashing headlong into the window screen above where I lay Over and over he pounds on his prison dumb to my quiet eye What if I can save him, I think I’d be so beautiful A little god with red fingernails…
Tonight you’ll be my long, dark drink That slick burn in the belly That stilling of hand A blood filled wine bottle, spilling for communion For I am an owl now a devouring phantom in the low light shape-shifting insomniac, unblinking on a perch and my eyes are fixed on you.
Fat birds in the lawn to greet me just before twilight when the blades are cool and the earth exhales in shadow Engine idling Solo piano swelling in the cab in my chest I crack the window A break in the dam for notes to spill into infinite space unnoticed by gravity I like to…
the same thing i love most feeling I don’t want to miss anything I’ll set down my recorder in the world and walk away and take in the cool in my sweat my daughter’s deepest wound traffic yawning in the distance like a seashell over a child’s ear barking dog laundry detergent wood smoke on…
… Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not,…
the burn never stops burning the ache never stops aching and when one part of the body dies ten thousand bodies rise up to fall headlong into that cold hole We think we’re alone and sweet Jesus, we are But what amazes me even in the witch’s hour roll call when the clock ticks like…
Sobriety Poet 