Poetry

why she had six children,
your mother’s mother
who liked math and science,

When he was small,
I rented a little studio 
in a building on Ninety-Fifth Street so I could have a room 
of my own to write. The studio was the size of a bathroom.

Now that I’m dead too, just like the living dead on TV, 
fat chance that the merely living will be saved 
by doing what they did when I was merely living— 
nailing their doors shut against me, 
hurricane-proofing the windows, 
positioning...

like a game show or some other excuse
for selling toothpaste. Wish I could remember who said that, 

If someone was kind enough to take us driving out to the long roads
that veered away from cornfields to the farms, pig roasts & parties 

I look at you with my vexed eye.
I look at you with my hostile eye.
I look at you with my hostile and vexed eye.
My hostile, vexed eye is a wrench.

Only a torso now, the head
long severed from the neck, pelvis
twisted off like a stubborn root.

I wish we were living
a story of desire, but
I don’t feel Odysseus 
beating out his tale
of longing at the oars

Forever you find

              your father
in other faces—

a balding head
              or beard enough
to send you following

A stifling heat—the air heavy—
and all around the loud, wet forest 
knotting the gaps in its own sound.

A peace long earned, then broken;