little brother

Clothesline Death is drawn to sound like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer, comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless, comes to shout, without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat. Nevertheless its footsteps sound and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree.                                                                                 Death Alone                                   ...

Support: Where Purpose                                                 Drifts The poet is a great mute.  He wheezes his infirmity, mumbles, stutters, fumbles; his great error is human.                                 Anna Kamienska But maybe the worst part isn’t that it’s not over, that I came into this thinking exactly that it was that I’d have to step back into it and I imagined the ring ropes I was driven to make my home over and over and only when my fists weren’t down and I saw it but didn’t duck, the upper- cut to the jaw I went through ...

The Cliché of Rape When God makes dust of our cooling magma, musingly crumbling the last galls and studs of our being, the only place we can go if we’re not destined for hell, or there already, is purgatory—for certainly heaven’s no place for a film of dust to settle…                                                                                 Denise Levertov                                    ...

Shaker Meeting House Women's Entrance Canterbury, New Hampshire After She Left I know you stay away: you stay away: and why you stay away you stay away to stay silent you stay away to save your face to face away from the day she made her way out the door and left you looking through the squares of the wire screen and something in you broke almost clean through and because it didn’t make it all the way to the bottom and through you curled there on the almost solid spot of it and did what three-year-olds do who want their mother in the compact cold of it all: you shook and swayed and made do with the balled up edge of the blanket and the ache that made you take it into your mouth isn’t it recreated every day for years and years when you wait for her to make her way back—but in the spaces of she may and she never will , you continue to grow up and that shard-bed bottom is, is, it sometimes is, high as you are on your...

YOU  WILL NOT BE  ALONE                                 (Is this true? Is this true?)                        (Can writing this poem make it less true?)                                                                                             ...

On Storytelling: The Quiet One or the Coward Here Aeneas dares to hope he has found some haven and, after all his hard straits; to trust again in better times.                                 Doc                                 Mary Doria Russell I’m reading about Doc Holliday and his treacherous cough, how it drove him west to seek the restive cure.  I’m reading he was quiet good with teeth and easy too and how if you knew he was pulling at the root of you he was always so courteous too, and he had it out and in the tin really a big ole pearl you made your own self all these years and he gave it back to you even though it was...

Knot U.S.S. Constitution  Thoughts on Dying Out of the stillness of the unbound forest, animals came forth from dens and nests. And it was not fear or cunning that made them so quiet, but the desire to listen.                                                 From their Listening, a Temple                                                 Rainer Maria Rilke The room you walk into after it’s all been taken away: the masks, the machines, those beeping hideous machines whose chords one day i...