after James Tate the size of shovels. They looked like silver oars in the lamplight, which made the dirt a chocolate ice cream. “This is so sweet,” you said behind me, pretending too. We rowed that way through the darkest soil, through the worms and the roots, the tiny gems in the jetsam. All night …
Originally published in the Press-Enterprise, July 2014 If you ask a roomful of poets what poetry actually is, you’ll hear a lot of grandiloquent hemming and hawing. Poets talk about poetry like the old parable of the blind men describing an elephant: “It’s long and slender like a snake!” “No, it’s thick and sturdy like …
Nighthawks, 1942 She says that everything is after Hopper. That posh hotel—you looked about to slap her, but never did. Sometimes she’d wait at night in her blue robe, face folded like the note you didn’t leave crumpled in a coat pocket. Sometimes she’d stand in broad daylight, naked before an open window, flesh so …
Rose Bowl, 2006 As she trills the last note, there’s smoke. Each song now taken literally. When the fire- crackers burst, we leap to our relief. We clap, put our fingers in our teeth. Then the B-1 Lancer in the twilight. Drum-roll of the turbofans, their heat. —from American Fractal
First light through the limbs of the trees. And then the trees. Each morning the hum of traffic through the freeway wall. And then the traffic we’re bottled in. Each thing first betrayed by the shapes around it. As if shadows held all our weight. Like the empty space that props each fiery nest of …
Beside the concrete pond, small children fish for nothing. This is all it costs to wish: a yard of yarn, a crooked stick. They cast their paper cups as if they might outlast hunger, as if a minnow might appear from muck and shoes and empty cans of beer. We watch them scoop up all …
RochesterInk Poetry Festival, October 2007 This talk might be subtitled, “Where Poetry Comes From,” because that’s what I’m most interested in. The best poems, the poems we want to reread and memorize and carry with us forever, are those that offer some kind of insight. They connect. They resonate. They touch on a deeper truth—a …