At Highland Park.(more…)
1.
I ask for an iced tea
and she fills a glass
with ten (eight?) ounces
of water the color
of a seedy pomegranate's
bloody flesh, pours
it all over eight (ten?)
cubes of glassy ice.
"Here you go," she says
as her eyes meet mine
for just long enough
to give pause: but I
was already here.
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Five Poems
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A Drive to Princeton
You ask me what life is like here in New
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Jersey, so I drive you down to Princeton.
Of course, we don’t have to drive; there are trains
and buses in New Jersey, and there are
other people who could drive us, too. But
the trains are there to take you out of state,
and the buses are there to take you to
corners you’d never recognize if you
weren’t already living here. So a
drive with the car down to Princeton it is.
-
Premiere: An Evening Interlude
Home again, in New Jersey.
He drew a bath, warm water filling the white
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porcelain tub. Beyond the window, night
fell as two evening swifts spun silken threads
of shadow in flight. Children splashed wildly
-
Impressions
For everyone who breathed life into my time in Ghent.
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If you tune your ear to the streets,
the way he learned to do on his walks,
you'll feel the weight of the city
pressing on his heart.
-
[In place of a poem, titled “Inventory,” that I would have written]
Saturday, May 25, 2024, in Ghent. For R. M.
1.
There was a catalogue of things I had devised for this poem, the one I would have titled “Inventory,” to give shape and voice to the life I had lived in the past three years. Each stanza of the poem would have begun with the introduction there were, followed by a plural noun of the letter “C”: colors, countries, cities, companions, conversations, compositions, conclusions. These c-nouns, as I’d planned it, would have been headings for list-like observations.Some of the lines I drafted were clever. But my clever fiction collapsed in on itself when I wanted to include the nouns that didn’t start with “C” (space and time), even as I wanted to end it all on a heavy line: There was not enough time.
Still, I wrote what I could in two stages. The first draft, which I scrawled in my sketchbook, was raw and rough. The second draft, which I penned in my thin notebook of poems, was better shaped though imperfect.
But then the clock struck nine-thirty and I had to leave. So I put away the sketchbook, notebook, and pen in my backpack, and I left.
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Poems on Poems about Poems
I.
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I dislike prose
for the truths it tells;
I dislike poetry
for the truths it tells not.
II.
Sprawling its limbs in the shade of the tree,
the poem eyes the landscape,
wary of any threat to its pride.
-
Eight Visions
I.
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I watched a child
drop a stone
into a pond.
Where it
sank,
the water
gulped,
then heaved its
body
for half a
second.
Its
skin
rippled
outward
in circling folds
around where the child
dropped the stone I watched
sinking half a second into the rippling,
circling skin of the water’s ponderous, gulping body.
-
The Office
You could hear the whistling of wheels on wet pavement outside any window in the world; could follow the fast footfall of heels and sneakers and dress shoes in any office corridor in the world; could catch the clatter of glasses and plates and cups and metal utensils in any kitchen in the world.
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Between Two Rivers 