Poetry

The feast-huddle explodes when I approach,
a gray fox remains, whitening to bone.
The risen wait in the limbs above
for me to glance the marker, pass on.

Like a hole so big
it swallows itself every night and cries O
in the morning—
that much, little boy coughing up sunlight.

Arrows dash down the wall.
Time crawls like a cockroach. 
Wait, don’t toss the plates

When lightning dropped its whip onto
the Squirrel Hill, the explosion
broke the air all up and down
the rainy valley.

This morning
   two deer
      in the pinewoods,
         in the five a.m. mist,

in a silky agitation,
   went leaping
      down into the shadows

When the heart valve buckles
or the brain vessel ruptures and I,
at last accomplished, stumble sloshed
in blood over the edge of the earth
into the faulty recall of a few people,
don’t weep for me.

I can’t remember how old I was,
but I used to stand in front
of the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine
what it would be like to be dead.

Sure enough, I hear the old
I told you so:
Now that you have a child—