Poetry

There’s a moment—barely—when you see both
ocean and bay from the 280 as it mills north
near Millbrae, the waters flash what they know
of daylight, and you register being a sort of gliding porch
before dunking back under cypress

I don’t lie, but I try to make myself sound worse off than I am.

Milk-tack, sugar cubes, cotton balls, chalk; 
coffee filters, marshmallows, artificial

It begins with a gesture and then grows

Because she paints barefoot, she’s barefoot in his painting
of her painting. Well, not painting, but modeling for him
as the painter she is and gazing toward her ostensible model,

You don’t start at zero. You start way below zero.

I went to God but found
I was fog, expected to dissolve

The puppeteer darted in and had his black cloth strung waist-high,
pole to pole across the Métro car, before the doors even closed.
We were standing to the front of the carriage but a bit behind him
and could see only his right side, where a...

I told myself five hundred would be enough

to begin to make a plan.

From a plastic Adirondack on the back deck
of a cabin sealed once but abandoned
to a splinter-shaggy-cinder-silver-gray,
I’d watched day diminish as vision does 
when force on eye nerve bloats (vignetting) 
and I’d come through regimented grass...