I came from the country
With flowers,
Larkspur and roses,
Fretted lilies
In their leaves,
And long, cool lavender.

I carried them
From house to house,
And cried them
Down hot streets.
The sun fell
Upon my flowers,
And the dust of the streets
Blew over my basket....Read more

You do know, right,
that between the no-
longer & the still-
to-come

you are being continually
tattooed, inked

with the skulls of
everyone

you've ever loved-the you
& the you

& the you & the you-you don't
sit in a chair, thumb

through a ...Read more

Dusk fell every night. Things
fall. Why should I
have been surprised.

Before it was possible
to imagine my life
without it, the winds

arrived, shattering air
and pulling the tree
so far back its roots,

ninety years, ripped
and sprung. I think
as it fell it ...Read more

Lamentation (Martha Graham, 1930)
What shall I compare to you, that I may comfort you, virgin daughter of Zion? Lamentations 2:13

Wordless, ceaseless,
a second, seamless skin,
this blue refrain

sings of comfort,
camouflage, the rarest
right - to remain

faceless, featureless, <...Read more

Life, this charade of not-death.
Amnesiac of our nights together,
overheard talking in some other voice.
The great fruits of my failure:

silk milk pills with little bitter pits.
Who talks like that? Says we are

ever-locked, leaving everything
petalled and veined the way nature

...Read more

After it ended badly it got so much better
which took a while of course but still
he grew so tender & I so grateful
which maybe tells you something about how it was
I'm trying to tell you I know you
have staggered wept spiraled through a long room
banging your head against it holding crushed
bird skulls ...Read more

The little sparrows
Hop ingenuously
About the pavement
Quarreling
With sharp voices
Over those things
That interest them.
But we who are wiser
Shut ourselves in
On either hand
And no one knows
Whether we think good
Or evil.
Then again,
The old man who goes about ...Read more

The light beats upon me.
I am startled-
a split leaf crackles on the paved floor-
I am anguished-defeated.

A slight wind shakes the seed-pods-
my thoughts are spent
as the black seeds.
My thoughts tear me,
I dread their fever.
I am scattered in its whirl.
I am scattered like
...Read more

Maybe it was hog-killing time
when he arrived in Lynchburg,
Virginia, several lifetimes behind him,

the old smell of the monkey house
at the New York Zoological Gardens
receding, a broken memory left.

Not sure of the paths & turns
taken, woozy in a swarm of hues,
he stood in Anne ...Read more

Because the tube is turned to the window, the neighbor's buddy coughs
a cough of pigeons. a hack of grackle. a bird out the window. It's like
the neighbor's buddy on my ledge, smoking. The neighbor's chum in the blinds,
the eyes that peer, the eyes that open. propped and sunglassed. a kind

of smoking blackbird, an ...Read more

John William Boone (1864-1927) world-renowned Ragtime pianist.
C
my motto for life

- merit, not sympathy, wins-

my song against death.

Eb

i stroke piano's

eighty eight mouths. each one sings

hot colors of joy

F

pentatonic black
...Read more

If music be the food of love, play on.
-Alice Herz-Sommer, survivor of the Theresienstadt ghetto / concentration camp
This is the house that music built:
each note a fingertip's purchase,
rung upon rung laddering

across the unspeakable world.
As for those other shrill facades,
rigged-for-a-day ...Read more

The mountains are at their theater again,
each ridge practicing an oration of scale and crest,
and the sails, performing glides across the lake, complain
for being out-shadowed despite their gracious
bows. Thirteen years in this state, what hasn't occurred?
A cyclone in my spirit led to divorce, four books
...Read more

And for the first time heard you speak my name.
Then like the sun your sweetness overcame
My shy and shadowy mood; I was aware
That joy was hidden in your happy hair,
And that for you love held no hint of shame;
My eyes caught light from yours, within whose flame
Humor and passion have an equal share.
<...Read more

The apple on its bough is her desire,-
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the ...Read more

Until I find a name
I will not put it in the soul calculator
I will leave it free and open and unnamed
And not limit my expectations for the kind of person
That goes in one direction of the wind
I will keep all lines of the wind open
And place all my days free and empty
And re-envision what it means to ...Read more

To have been told "I love you" by you could well be, for me,
the highlight of my life, the best feeling, the best peak
on my feeling graph, in the way that the Chrysler building
the best, the most exquisitely spired, or the way that
Hank Aaron's career homerun total is not the highest
but the best, the one that ...Read more

Come, Lord, and lift the fallen bird
Abandoned on the ground;
The soul bereft and longing so
To have the lost be found...


Before the movers came,
we found the sparrows' nest

concealed inside the chive
plant on the patio.

And the bald chicks there
calling, unfledged...Read more

I'm in a carousel.
The kind that spins
people to the wall.
There is a woman
and a man and a man
inside of it too,
and a man operating it.
Everybody I love is
looking down at me,
laughing. When I die,
I'll die alone.
I know that much,
held down by my
own shadow, wanting...Read more

We see a little farther now and a little farther still-C.D. Wright
*
I ask the rain to remit, but not because I am ungrateful
A raincheck for the rain-is such a thing possible?

In Florida, even the cold is warm by comparison
We sit at the ocean's lip as it licks the sand from our toes

Consider ...Read more