Poetry

Where those deer bedded down
was where my friend said
deer bedded down
before he realized it was where
his friends a day back pitched
a tent. Suddenly whatever pastoral
slant the light had went poof.
All those groves in haiku
the eyes shining in them
just a...

A translation of Emile Nelligan’s Rêve d'une nuit d'hôpital (for Shane Neilson)

Wearing the white of her paintings, sublime
Cecile is seen by the Saint, her head haloed --
and Jesus, Mary and Joseph are seated,
I listening from the bannisters, in time...

For Sun Ra

The bandleader seeks the sound of duos: call, response.
Lovers bicker back and forth in angelic proclamations.
This is the fight after the finish! Myth Versus Reality! The ideal
of lion versus the scrawny tawny body she shot on film.
Over the...

Cocaine is like, whatever, sex sex sex. Hotel sex, public bathroom sex, no-one-can-come-but-you-fuck-forever sex. Heroin is a slow deep wet kiss with your own image without bothering to get out of the chair to look in the mirror. A guy I knew...

It suggests its own passage over a plain, the passage
                                                                                           of nations
into another’s occupied day—time, lovers
                                                    ...

Doing what, I don’t know, being alive. The green
of her is a scum on the surface, she would like
to look at herself. Should I have a memory?
she wonders. Of mother washing my frogskin
in muddy water? I do not have that memory.
My near-transparent frogskin...

Say you have two goldfish, pet-store

fishlets bought for 25-cents each, carried

home in a plastic bag and nurtured for years.

Let's say you clean the tank, place each fish

in its own half-filled Mason jar, each

a bit small for large fish, but adequate

for...

From the roadside we spot
the Jersey’s hide, camouflaged
in wheat, tufts of guts and fur

in milkweed. Up close, eyes dusted,
ribs minced from the maw,
with chrome clipboards we poke

and draw the remains. Test
intestines for conductivity. Urine
for toxicity...

Folds and folds of black cloth drop
and suddenly, a woman.

I watch from
my rented chaise lounge
as she runs to the sea
like any other pussy-on-stilts,
like me.

In the water she opens and closes her legs
to let the flow in and out and back to the cargo ships
w...