Poetry

In the Old Dictator’s obituary, a charming anecdote—

When the Old Dictator was a boy, his father saved his wages
for a month to buy his son a watch.

We have come together, the Board Chair begins,
for obvious reasons. In a time of great division, this table—
he raps his knuckles against the oak
for emphasis

Please scream / inside your heart: hold / your terror, your errors, your // regrets apart / from those around you.

With the right sponge and brush, you could / paint these walls to look like marble. In the two-story / foyer, the previous owner left a giant painting / of southwestern pots.

When we moved with our first newborn / into this ’70s raised-ranch house, / I pretended some benevolent ghost / could soothe him.

Of course they sing—/ we have given them / no other verb.

Absent bounty, anarchic and asymptotic, / Bedlam banked as beauty, captive cuckolding / Capital and its camel-faced captor, master, the / Devil is in the dove’s details

A is for almost, arriving, my father’s death. / B is for bear, which he does and does not do. / C is for care and critics and leaving them to their caskets.

I think I lost the genetic lottery, / my cousin told me // in one of the last conversations / we had

My daughter learns I’m there / even when I am not. I name this trust