Poetry

Confusion is the foreigner’s advantage. Natives 
tamp the nuance in their sounds. Stranger 
seeking refuge pockets vowels, picks gesture,
learns body, gets caught up on the cobble 

Imagine you could learn 
the names of every river,
each upthrust mountain
and fault folded on itself:

There must’ve been some incident, something to push both Dickinson and Proust into isolation, the horse thought as a student, but now he thinks time and immortality require one’s full attention. 

Outside the Visitor Center—patrons queuing up in
khaki camo shorts, baseball caps, Where Big Bucks 
Lie, boxes of MoonPies wheeling by—two black 
men with rubber gloves, with Windex, on a July 
Monday, polish the bronze Lincoln.

solo, skirting the rim of our smolder, our ruin,

all lotus bud, bell-beat & drum-song, those many hands &
the severed heads they hold, masc-demonic,

                    toenail polish warped waxen from sand, you leave 
          your body behind again—mere rind, edges buzzing
from unsought touch. you end up in a skeleton

In rubber rafts on the open field of the Adriatic, open field of the Mediterranean. 
In a diesel-powered ship setting out from Hamburg in 1939. 

I used to believe there was so much evil in the world,
and though I’m the gentlest of all my friends, I never saw a rose in a vase

I need to try a syntax of each in place
of accounting: each-syntax as language 
within reach of one’s own body,