Poetry

My Latin is limited
My Greek is worse
And the languages
And signs
The drawings
The bones
We find

Dead I would dream the sky and the sky breaking into flakes and falling gathering itself into fat drops plopping into summer dust the acrid smell rising / I would dream the sky shivered the sky repeated as blue eye staring back as mote in...

Squint, reader, through the sudden fog: 
                            the sea’s gnaw and lick-bright:
Eldey, pillar of stone: where two
                            great auks survive, briefly—
before reenacting the end of their story

& my memories of you are thin as cotton worn with age / & soft / & blurred from too much touching too much wear

Where you are going
you cannot take
your things leave
in this locker the rivets
at the corners of your blue
jeans

There are so many things a body
can collect into itself
milk of a mother in a cup of coffee

Two Cooper’s hawks on an electric pole, facing
opposite directions. The larger bird hopped up to the 

top as I neared. I stood there until my eyes hurt.
Our eyes must be on loan. When we die, we 

have mercy nothing
prepared my body to lose its
brother nothing prepares a grown man to fall

The tops of the buildings were shorn. So I walked
down Market Street to see if I could find them. 

The fog tried to take my head off. I was so scared on
some parts of Market that I stayed a few feet behind 

In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness
he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather
thrashing in a gravel bed.