(for Steve Hiatt) Hold sleep, the certain knot of peace,you’ve found her—church supper, in eulogy, changingmoney in the narthex, buoyant, brightly unstringingcarnival tickets from a spool, marking tallies,stamping hands maybe, respectably engagingthe grinners come to
Already, he has worked like this for hours, moving his scythe beneath the gold horizon. There’s stillness here. There is the swirl of wheat,
On the way home, at Yaqoobi circle we hit that hard right angled turn and got the truck stuck like we have about a thousand other times. That turn always tricks somebody. We were working to clear the
Acrostic: Grandmother Mary and the Great War Could this be the river that burned?Under late summer’s waning moonyellow star-points of fireflies flashed onand off in evening’s mists, constellations rearranging themselves throughhaze high above avenue lamps
In memoriam: Clementa Pinckney and eight others murdered at Mother Emanuel It’s only here where I’ve seen the surf crimping into ruffled-up petticoats, the edges of olive and indigo skirts of wave, of glance,
We pull them on daily weighted with sentiment, one at a time; first over the toes, sliding past the arches, and finally tugging up and over the heel. We tightly knot the laces, tucking in
for Joan Sit under the tree long enough And you will be covered in blossoms We will all bury our loves In the cold earth of springtime Even if no one
“ . . . there is nothing so coherent as a paranoid’s delusion or a swindler’s story.”—Clifford Geertz, in his study of Balinese cockfighting We’ve left the frontier with the blue helmets. There is always
For my grandfather, Lewis Parke Chamberlayne “ . . . so-called periods of transition (if all periods are not so) –those centuries when a new religious or political systemis growing up amidst the decay of
The origin story is as follows: a fairy and a dragon fall in love, they fuck.Then they separate, each taking half of the eggs that would hatchinto the Vietnamese people, for the princess longed for
In the attic of this hundred year-old housethe gable window stares dry-eyed into the sun. Years ago, careless and in a hurry to finish at the topof a tall ladder, I painted it shut from
Iraq war protestors. Feb. 15, 2003 JFK Federal Building, Boston, March 2003 After days of drums, chanting, and frightened planningwe sit, quiet, on a scab of concrete,blocking the spinning doors of war.My animal eyes fix
