Basho’s Death Poem, New York City
Sick on a journey my dreams wander the withered fields – Basho In an old notebook were the beginnings of a poem about Basho’s last poem, the one he composed while he died. In the notes, the speaker walks from 31st Street to 17th in Manhattan and remembers Basho’s lines. …
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The Devotions
Sneezing and shiner-eyed in an entire landscape ripped by wind and today I wrestle every negative arriving my inbox while finches feast on suet, rubbing round heads to each other, to glued seed. March is and did and has just …
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I Loved Lucy
I wanted to be like Lucy—trapped on the IRT with a loving cup stuck upside down on my head— and not get mugged. To steal John Wayne’s footprints from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre without remorse, then bunk with Ethel for a whole week, mindless of half-naked show girls, the fact that …
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My Birthfather Explains His Death
Antarctica, 1979 Death is not dark as you’d imagine, but white, frozen, your name signed into the otherworld of stone and ice. It’s easy to die — one day you’re 22, offloading a Coast Guard cutter, and the next, you’re tumbling toward the snowsheet, pinned beneath it, your heart slowing …
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These Things Permit Less Gratitude
Rising like westerly smoke, the death last night was beautiful. I’ve got no reference for forests burned to ash, transformed to sky, but for now I’ve named this East Coast evening – Dimmed. Disappointment in Dad’s bloodshot grey, become Maine sunset. I shudder with the coming morning. Death may be …
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The Answer for Everything
If the body is indeed composed of mud and fossil, rib cage woven of branches clipped from tired acacia. If the moon pulls back from its seat as planned. If comets pour into one another like coffee from a carafe and the calendar becomes either all-dark or all-light. If …
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Anima
So much harmony of limb I knew by being but could not parse it Then when the finch was pecked down to its clear-as-wax-bones imprint sang the idiom these little glowing letters …
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Hyperosmia
Three steps beyond the doorsill, I’m horselike, my nostrils flick; bearlike, snout to sky. To sun-mellowed cement, I carry the scent of morning toast unburnt, coffee uncreamed. I put my nose to slug slime, to aphid lace and fresh spider silk. Test my super- (or sub-) human olfactory skills. The …
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So Many Dead
Bottles with the cap on, drifting on a sea where nothing sinks and nothing opens. Oceans, poisoned by a drink of water. Press-on fingernails dance in curls along the shore. Plastic swirls in eddies of Pacific vast, muzzled phantoms in a pulp, bobbing clear and blue and winking in the …
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sleeping bags
in a silent house, wakefulness is our cloak of invisibility so we listen to the gossamer touch of our feet on the linoleum floor echo like a shared secret and we step out into the lavender haze of 2 AM. i once wanted to tell the future but every prophecy …
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