November 2001
March 23, 2018You notice the smells first, more spring, or
even summer, than late fall, the stale-clean
scent of wet sunlit streets after last night’s
heavy rain, the musk of soaked dead leaves,
DiaBLOGue
Brown
March 23, 2018I’m mostly brown. I have brown hair and, in summer, brown skin. It’s not a pretty golden brown like the models in the tanning lotion ads. It’s a kind of ashy, dirty brown. My eyes…
The Hands of Cowboy Red
March 23, 2018When my father sucked in and released his last hyphenated breath, I was holding his weightless hands, trying to make them warm. He was old. He had cirrhosis of the liver, an abdominal aortal aneurysm…
Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1999
March 23, 2018Soft summer wind lifts girls’ sheer dresses into wings,
Pinks, reds, and golds winking and rippling through the air
Like babies cooing far away.
They pose round-faced and porcelain
Flying in a Confined Space
March 23, 2018In my dream, people mill at a fair, trying things they’ve never before done. There’s horseback riding on flashy steeds and archery with brightly fletched arrows. At the fair’s farthermost edge, wings rest upon the…
The Riverbank, Late Winter: Living North
March 23, 2018A lined calendar of empty trees
turns the cold
consolable. Even light this dim
is an invitation.
The Fall of My Fiftieth Year
March 23, 2018Winter already edging down
from mountain passes, I walk past
our first town cemetery, filled with upright
markers and gold-red trees.
It’s had no vacancies for years.
Eighteen Thousand Sundowns
March 23, 2018Near a rock slope of hill pasture,
grass grows up through a few old bones.
Again, what’s moved past recall
is not past pain. White as the noon-day
Reading into Dusk
March 23, 2018On the wood porch I awake
to no sound, but a sense of some change:
light falls across an arm and
I pull back into darkness.
#939: Ambulance Unit
March 23, 2018‘Say goodbye to all
this bluddled nonsense on earth:
simple rot inside
a coffin’s a better life.
I’m now more trouble than I’m