Poems

But it is the end of the world to River, who’s standing there
thrown by its incomprehensibilities as I play him R.E.M.,
which is otherwise what he needs, total sleep and churning dreams,
not the drums, distortion and irony, he does not feel fine,

These days, evenings are heavy
with clouds that refuse to crack, to open
a window is let in the night
creatures, which flutter and tumble
into the glow of a phone

1.     worlds inside brown eyes
2.     a figure in a bed
3.     stars in summer
4.     women of clay

Suitcase red girl teenager together

New space time moving thataway

Farewell waving family people mindset

[      ] commands a thunderless lightning, a noiseless rain
to spill strange – cold and dark –
over the prostrating city. [      ]
does not shout tonight, the veins
in my legs do not swell. overheard:
a child mimics a lightning strike

Like I’m doing something a lone self
determined, I put foot to floorboard.
Into a harder and faster world
brittler and slowlier

What had art – their
own, anyway – ever been
about, though, if not

A son doesn’t love what he’s supposed to love,
so what’s left to abandon? I have abandoned you,
failed forest, I say to the jade plant. A cube of milk
defrosts on the counter and daylight floods the room.

If I love wine, it’s as an admirer of colour
and texture: how the glass sends a skewed
view of the room’s edges away from me,
as desired at five when I require distance

What was the point of a landscape’s allegories,
or the show of fractured bedrock in Bellini’s
Transfiguration, the way it caught the folding
and tightening, the rough-shod squeezing of old
strata, and the intrusion of the igneous, ferns’