Poetry

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their glassy wrappers,
perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade

Gathered in the yard, shed-side, pokeweed, 
black walnut, pecan tree all leafed and 
umbrellaing. My grandmother, the relatives

When the ache was just too much, I’d skip
down the hill to the slip where you
and a small boat were always waiting.

I loved you, New York.

The way, at first, Tina loved Ike, loved even the winged
Effort of his anger, loved his punch-drunk backhand in flight,

Oh, obstreperous one, ornery outside of ordinary
protocols; paramilitary probie par 

excellence: Every evidence
you yield yells. 

In the stillness of a windless day,
trees stand full, and proud, and straight.

He was in a poem once, alive 
at the beginning, dead by the middle, 
haunting me at the end.

Beaucoup de musique de Miley on the air—
As one may imagine, there is a Rihanna button, and it is
what you push when you enter the control room, and

Now when I get personal
I have only one thing to say
(a dead gay once told me,