Poetry – swamp pink

Love: Greek to Me

It’s an alphabet from another galaxy. Like an ecstatic idiot, I try to listen through a telescope, expecting logic in the hysteria of a typhoon. Often it’s just a furious dialogue between a hippopotamus and a rhinoceros. The cataclysmic chorus of hubris. A hemorrhage. Why do we expect nectar then need morphine? It starts out an orchestra. An Olympic-sized orgy. Sometimes ending in a visit to the clinic. It’s supposed to be epic. Cardiac ambrosia. But we’re more hypochondriac than hero. More panic than music. All...

Allelopathy

In which one plant exudeschemicals to suppress anotherspecies. The cunning violenceof red nature. See the chloro-phyll fail, the vine etiolate:God’s dubious acre, the acre’sdubious god. How, now, wehave published toxicity. Stilldays in winter, the photo-chemical smog, rusty as marrow’sown begun blood. Air comescold off the Benguela.We should say ‘perishing’,but for the length of a morningit...

love after divorce

before you I was a diligence purist unerringly vigilant I strode to & fro in my ruined rooms where did it go the pitch-perfect rhyme the unfailing order & ardor of each dusty fixed form that restrained me from taking an axe to the roots of the tree I was sitting in in whose dying arms I finally found myself cradled & rocked by you now if any order remains it must be subcellular a calm I can’t see but must...

Transpacific Love Story

Emptying the truck was Seung-Pyo’s first job in America: passing cardboard boxes through gradations of night letting them fall upon the belt with the arrhythmia of raindrops. The stopwatch throbs like a headache worsened by the fluorescent bulbs which glare like no natural thing. The rain doesn’t let up. Routing the bruised packages was his second job. One per second: no romantic metaphors here. Enveloped...

Crowded House

Harald Sohlberg, “Fisherman’s Cottage” in the museum gallery craquelure on black Norwegian trees as if the dusklight is piercing through their wooden centuries the glowing white cabin on the edge of the water is home in any language people nearly pass by the painting without looking but again and again they pause as if hearing faint music faces lightly creasing for a moment as if trying to recall...

Self-Portrait as Woman Cut Out of a Toulouse-Lautrec Painting

“At the Moulin Rouge” (1892-5) My forehead somewhere between absinthe and turquoise. Stiff-cheeked, Medusa caught in her own glance. Ghastly, ghastly. I have glimpsed something just over your head, the shot in the horror film before the mutated bat drops from the ceiling. My monstrosity similarly without shame. Never before have pink-shadowed eyebrows been so troubling. Carnelian lips a sharp, sensuous terror. The Moulin Rouge is a reef behind me:...

Chain of Causation

Past a given, but untold, threshold the mind suggests it’s OK to let people do what they want, for a change. They start composing texts by dictation straight- up phone to face—carefully noting where punctuation goes—in public spaces and don’t even feel awkward about it. They relent and let the dog start sleeping in the bed after years of principled, ironclad prohibition. We heave...

Second Location

Everything you’ve ever wanted is [sitting] on the other side of fear —“George Addair” It still happens, read the news, a machete attack Just the other week, brazen broad daylight, Not an hour away from where I sit doing this Instead of tardy taxes or building up a following (In 1997, Albert Goldbarth said to me, Virgil Didn’t spend his time working on Virgil.com But please subscribe...

When Echolalia Becomes a World in the Mouth of my Son

Echolalia, a form of imitation, is a useful component of language acquisition. —National Institute of Health How do I know if making pillows of his lips w/ma ma is for fun or function? When do fluffs of accent just to muffle his trumpet become a beckon for my breast? His spar w/consonant w/vowel w/consonant w/vowel is a soft mallet he drops & drops....

Let’s Make Politics!

Steal the class from its imaginary teacher. There’s no shame in being the feather chosen to fall from its wing, or the tear voted into service by the quick hush of a heart. There are other ways of dying than getting elected. Like waving that tattered flag of a tongue. Or spinning your disgusting beard into yarns of proof....

Naïve Melody

on repeat in the truck’s cab, doors open. I made a mental list of who we might be. Heretic, said the good silly drug of blood to my limp body. Dracula, said this body to my blood. It’s good fertilizer, she said, blood. We dripped a cup across rows marked with sticks & string. If we can’t reach up, we reach down. She dug hands into the damp dirt. She soured into...

Once We Were a Rainbow

Look at this light—the mimosa fireworking her joy, each cartwheeling blossom perched in ache & flaunt, perfuming our backyard quarrels—the sad soup & droop. Look— scarlet veins in the garden chard, the ruby streak of the trout, beets staining my finger-tips and the red-bloom of her blushed cheeks or yes, love, that heat in the heart of a first summer peach. Look at this marvel—orange marigolds in our daughter’s hair, joy rides & life vests, life vests & love fests. Do you remember? California poppies fluttering in droves, monarchs weightless in mid-air—all valencia & mandarin. The sugar maple painted luminous with sunbeams. She has drawn us another rainbow. In the amber morning, yolks running down the fork of a good mouthful. Remember? Roadside eyeful of mustard blooms, forsythia in maywind the wind lifting the yellow petals a little, or pollen pockets holstered in the crook’d knees of honeybees—miniature apex, golden & ground. See? The goldfinch sings in the cedar tree, crocus sprout hallelujahs...