Poetry

Wingbones shattered—feathers
Scattered over the continent—
The four unbroken animal limbs beating
A shadow-wind to keep aloft:

This dice-white Princess desk phone
Is a ghost, wearing a small bell
About its throat.

Tenderest pendulum,
     Your slender stem is
          Tremulous as it enters
               The minute’s fundamental;

The corridor, a New Jersey of the West, its stucco newness.
What king was it that built this highway?

It’s a routine we’ve worked out
to pass the winter.
I saw myself in two, in three,
into a puzzle,

How I hate you tonight!
I tick off
the bumps on your back,
your hangnails, the acid

I watch the point of the twirling stick
Where you are sleeping, where you will come again.

Nobody knows what anything
means anymore.
Sea-turtles run inland
at birth.

In every sale a list of ways your home 
could be destroyed: flood, poison, earthquake, fire. 

This early, the small birds’ trudging notes;
Six storeys high, a crane looms
As in graceful blessing…