Shortstop
I was four foot, one
caterpillar. Black hair
all tussle & God-talk.
Slim prayers pop-flying
from this gone bad fruit
for mouth. I stayed low.
Played king to the crickets.
I was salt lick. Spoonfed.
Confessional
Wednesday might be my favorite day.
All the bakeries in Berkeley open and
with a little conviction you can persuade
the guard you belong on the manicured
lawn of the tennis club, and maybe even
join the ladies and their ten-brim visors
for a sandwich of jambon and Gruyère.
Dusk
All the neighborhood kids come home from the woods
with something missing: shoelaces, a finger, an eye, the words
for table or mother.
Counterintelligence
What proves what we don’t know we don’t know.
What bends back to examine its own bending-back-on.
SCENES FROM THE MAUSOLEUM
Dead men in the kitchen next to a charcuterie board.
Dead men in the den at the poker table.
Dead men bathing in my tub, lying in my bed.
Music plays. I am a bird outside a window
of the house of my body.
THIS STICK OF GRAPHITE IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS
This stick of graphite is not like the others. You wouldn’t know it by writing.
Inside are ants, rushing up staircases, transporting eggs to safety.
MOON’S MORNING
Moon’s morning. Opening night.
Possum on porch, distressed and distressing.
And the just-enough use of force, like pressing
a dimple into a bottle cap.
A BIKE IS LIKE A THOUGHT BECAUSE
A bike is like a thought because
a smaller wheel drives a larger.
Put a bookmark right there, close book.
Or your finger, and close it partway.
AMENDMENT TO THE PLEDGE I SIGNED PROMISING TO NOT PROMOTE RADICAL THEORIES ABOUT THE OVERTHROW OF THE STATE WHILE TEACHING FOR THE STATE
Rabbit and the Years
In one hand, Rabbit carried a handful of water.
In two hands, Rabbit carried the handful of water.
INTO BEING
Here’s the only picture I have left: there is a telephone booth
in Otsuchi, white, four sides made of glass-panes.
DARK INK
See how pain comes like a developing image: slowly then all at once.
COUNTERPOINT
drowsy scansion
of the sycamore’s
crown, December’s
migrant penury
from People Who Look Like You
The problem of being with a white man belongs only to you, not to the white man with whom you share this problem.
A Hare’s Ear
A bone of cloud lain in the valley
of its begetting, a tumulus of souls,
laying the car on that and then under it, to emerge
to sun shining in a hare’s ear blowing dead
on the tar, and swaying the hips of the car