Virginia pine and more Virginia pine. Toad chirr at night.
Scribble of the mussel’s path in the shallows.
For god’s sake don’t
look out a window.
In a fawn-skin pouch, I keep a letter of introduction. Upon it I lay my head.
Read MoreThey hate it,
they’ll kill you–
they’re black holes,
they can’t be eavesdropped upon.
you thought of the times the place got rowdy,
Five folks elbow to elbow, passing the toilet paper,
The weird dance of odors, postures
I listened to the spiderwort’s purple testimony
and heard the fat rattle present its evidence,
also the subpoenaed catalpa.
May− thunder was shaking the house
Read MoreManure scented grass girds the breeze slipping through
a slit of window, a mere two inches that I open
to breathe my first bit of fresh air since October last year.
I cannot tell you how many pie-sweet cherries covered the grass—blanket blood-spotted.
Read MoreThe river was
as the river is
Yesterday, the plumber came
and unearthed a pound of hair
Each morning Willis plays checkers
with Eddie, the meth addict forty days clean
and she becomes the nothing
the world wanted from her.
I press my ear against the earth
for the usual reasons: to fathom
ant scrabble, the sibilance of suckling
roots, the stoic decomposition
of underlying stones, groundwater abiding.
Read MoreIndeed I cling to the morning newspaper,
its relatively ancient news administered in ink
upon the crinolines of many dead trees,
like the postmortem of a marriage
those in the know already know has ended in divorce.
Read More