Poetry

Here’s to 
the innards 
and ubers 

Nobody, my father said, could get so many
scrapes and scratches accidentally:
without them I probably would not have liked it so much.

Requisite dog bark. Far off.
No response.

I say archetype, but I really mean
messenger.

Time to pick berries. This strain (pink when ripe
instead of black) surprises me each August,
although I should be used to it by now.

Bending over the piano,
or putting the oboe to her lips,
she makes music the way a tree 

In the great Archaeological Museum of Naples, 
I visited Flora—force 
behind everything that flowers—a fresco 

Something quick and wet on my neck.
I whipped around, and right behind me
in the lunch line: Mary-Arkansas Greene,

No tide pools, no couples on the beach
where my parents met,

only whitecaps bowing and lifting,
until each blurs into itself.

[…]

Within the hush of birch medallions, 
fir fingers, wild scallions—
that company of dancers held