Land’s End (audio only)
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The Strange Hours Travelers Keep
The markets never rest Always they are somewhere in agitation Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 J mainframes Across the firmament Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets As they make their nightlong journeys Across the oceans and steppes Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information Trembling in the claw of Scorpio Not an instant, then shooting away Like an enormous cloud of starlings Garbage scows move slowly down the estuary The lights of the airport pulse in morning darkness Food trucks
2003
As You Never Bothered to Return My Call
What I had wanted was to be chaste,
sober and uncomfortable
for a sprawling episode on a beach somewhere
dirty, perennially out of fashion;
let the smell of cocoa butter drive deep memory wild
as the sun went down, a parti-colored blur,
examined through a bottle of pop
some kid gave up on only half-way through
and left to go warm in the sand.
The train ride would be long and hot,
and you, you’ve had it with men.
Me . . .
I’m sickened by the pronoun.
Tenderness seems as far away as Sioux City
2013
Green Sees Things in Waves
Green first thing each day sees waves— the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it, waves—which, you might say, things really are, but Green just lies there awhile breathing long slow breaths, in and out, through his mouth like he was maybe seasick, until in an hour or so the waves simmer down and then the trails and colors off of things, that all quiets down as well and Green starts to think of washing up, breakfast even with everything still moving around, colors, trails, and sounds, from the street and plumbing next door, vibrating—of course you might say that's what sound rea
1998