Explore Poems: Greek & Roman Mythology

Blood-gushered mountainside a brass parapegma of noon
glares behind: gore of hides. Beasts all slain. Shadeless midday. Specterless
differentiation. Glad day zodiacs augur. Awl of insight; hunters'
blades. Actaeon: and the spirits of motion. Actaeon
uttering:...

laurel tree, limbs bent and twined into crown           heifer          bank of marsh reeds,
handful lashed into pipes, …

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with…

was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet weeping. And aren’t they often weeping? The mother, tearing her hair out, running toward the battle lines, filling heaven...

He and I sought together,
over the spattered table,
rhymes and flowers,
gifts for a name.

He said, among others,
I will bring
(and the phrase was just and good,
but not as good as mine,)
"the narcissus that loves the rain."

We strove for a name,
while the light of...

Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.

Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack,
over and up and on;
over and...

I know not what to do—
My mind is reft.
Is song's gift best?
Is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
Now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.

Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager?
Is love's gift best?—
Nay, song's the loveliest.
Yet, were you lost,
What...

Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s
bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
and science has proven what it had to prove:
every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
where prayer...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could...

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....

A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks—
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.

I was coming home from Gymnasium,
I was so sweaty from running,
we all were, we all ran into the sea,
its freshness,
we gargled the...

Someone tells me the earth and everything in it
will belong to me if I catch the horizon before sundown.
I sprint, kicking up dust all the while.
It seems I run with everyone in the world
standing on my kidneys, eating my head.
What’s...

I. GERYON

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
Put his snoutsnout This image, suggestive of an animal such as a boar, may allude to Geryon’s father, Chrysaor (Khrysaor), sometimes depicted as a winged boar. Chrysaor is the brother of...

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence.

                ____

Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches.
They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Geryon was going into...

Eventually Geryon learned to write.

                ____

His mother's friend Maria gave him a beautiful notebook from Japan
with a fluorescent cover.

On the cover Geryon wrote Autobiography. Inside he set down the facts.
 
    Total Facts Known About Geryon.

    Geryon was a monster everything about him was red....

We have forgotten Paris, and his fate.
We have not much inquired
If Menelaus from the Trojan gate
Returning found the long desired
Immortal beauty by his hearth. Then late,

Late, long past the morning hour,
Could even she recapture from the dawn
The young delightful love?...

When the home is no more


When the mother's negative light goes also


When solitude rips the door from frame


When the transitory moves into the familial


Then: I often think of the drink, the notes, the contented, and badly drawn cartographies


On my bare...

memory first what
f-a-b-r-i-c  weave thread thin thick many
weave-shimmer magic
me-jaw-drop how-how-how

memory second what
people big-mouth-talk-my-face
me born deaf why
me bother deaf not

memory third what
l-o-o-m tall big
{stripe-down up-stripe-front}
look-like door magic

me want toy regular-regular play
no-no-no
w-a-r-p favorite toy
sometimes l-o-o-m weight fun too

threads slender same-same r-e-e-d-s
me-grow-up same-same
every-day...