Couplet

The city lies back in its winding-sheet
While little digits drum a steady beat

On roofs and terraces, …

My brother holds a snake by its head. The whole
            length of the snake is the length
 
of my brother’s body. The snake’s head
            is held safely, securely, as if my brother
 
is showing him something in the distant high grass.
            I...

Is it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones—
            is it okay not to look out this window, but to look out another?

A mentor once said, You can't start a poem...

For me, the movie starts with a black man
Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons

Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops

On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
The cool lean into the...

How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging

gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

I almost flinch to see the body later
that’s left its...

At my beloved’s burial,
I can’t see his body.

Only carnations. I hear
your name and my beloved’s

in the …

1.

He had a caribou's face. Once he let me 
lick the sadness there. It tasted of salt

and moss-covered rocks. He grew the beard
of a mountain goat. He scaled the face

of a mountain. Lying beside him, I stared
into the face of faceless...

A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length. A couplet is “closed” when the lines form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence (see Dorothy Parker’s “Interview”: “The ladies men admire, I’ve heard, /Would shudder at a wicked word.”). The “heroic couplet” is written in iambic pentameter and features prominently in the work of 17th- and 18th-century didactic and satirical poets such as Alexander Pope: “Some have at first for wits, then poets pass’d, /Turn’d critics next, and …

Look at your feet, so beautiful. Do
not step on the ground, filth will smear them;

your future will fill with pricks. He with a
fearful heart, understand dead. Death will dance

on your head — lift your eyes and see. I am
its servant,...

I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.
I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,

Thirst where the grasses burn in early May
And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay.

There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat
Grasshoppers...

I don’t realize I’m starved
for the color until the blood

washes up on the beach.
I’m craving red but still

haven’t seen the creature,
just the quick whip and slither

of its tail in the wake
—and then there I am,

facing the skin side
of the animatronic...

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird,—
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining...

The wish to climb a ladder to the loft
Of God dies hard in us. The angels Jacob saw

Were not himself. Bramble is what grows best
Out of this man-scarred earth, and I don’t chop it back

Till the fruit have ripened. Yesterday I...

1
The cyclamens have a hard time
breathing in July.

The sun ravages them and earth
is too dry.

Still, try remembering March light
and the tight

deep-buried bulbs that somehow
do not die.


2
The children are scattered
like weeds.

The children are scattered dust-colored
dirt-covered

like weeds. Mid-summer grey reigns,
and rain

exists not...

i.
 
Dog. The time you take home, the time you take away from home.
The insistence, the instance worried at with your thick tongue.
 
Stink. Because of what you found on the ground and put in your gut.
Harry. As in beset, or beast....

What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters
one after the other.

What we did to the trees, we did to our elders
stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door.

What we did to our daughters, we did to our...

The geometer wishes he were David
cut from stone by lightning, his mind

gyring wide into figures of space
out of time, ever gauging the shock

of the word for the pathos, ever
slinging the rock of his wound

at the sugared glass of me.
I'd rather...

Two fingers can turn
with ease to violence:
 
some things must not be
permitted to grow,
 
so I weed with the white lie
of remorse
 
the limp strands
that a woman who traded
 
her worn schoolbooks for refuge only
to grey in entrapment
 
has said means I was touched by...

I am being paraded through the streets with my head shaved,
with no memory of what I have done to deserve this.
 
I run a gauntlet of women who call me slut and whore,
staggering under their fusillade of accusation:
 
What stories did I...

They in their cruel traps, and we in ours,   
Survey each other’s rage, and pass the hours   
Commiserating each the other’s woe,   
To mitigate his own pain’s fiery glow.   
Man could but little proffer in exchange   
Save that his cages have a larger range.   
That lion...