Poetry

When cooking with cast iron pottery I flip and mince history in my kitchen. / In the deep heat some things age too sweet to the tongue, and I don’t drink enough / water to balance my diet of sitting & not sleeping.

Peace be with you— // another you, another morning, waiting for the train / metallic birdsong screeches

Carlos Santana or Jimi Hendrix or Chavela Vargas or the crushed Daffy Duck pinata / on the floor or an evening baseball game…

You fantasized about fossils as a kid. / Told me you wanted to get a tattoo / of a sandpiper’s skeleton cradled in the convex nest / under your eye.

water rising sickly / to the bone of your ankle. / walking wet lawns, / kicking rain up and birds / in your passage.

When my new doctor tells me, / Humans average about 19 pain-free days a year, / I say, /That’s sad.

A nighthawk has come with the night, / a whip-poor-will more like to // snatch moths and caddisflies / above the trees at dusk.

My father first taught me the family business of tongue. / I gummed clumsily the long vowels, the clipped / consonants. I spelled them in my sleep.

She dried dishes, sang and twisted to Tutti Frutti, and perhaps / paused, getting newlywed moony over Secret Love, and upped the / volume for Blue Suede Shoes, sung by a mannerly boy…

I’m indignant in front of an instruction manual / because I detest being told what to do // in such a concise, no nonsense manner.

All of us have done it at least once, / or want to do it. Immediately after / you’ve read this poem, you might do it.

135. The Chase.—Third Day.

He gave me scurvy— / that deficient diet of blackmailed love.