Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Poems
Find and share the perfect poems.
More by this poet
All about Carrowmore the lambs Were blotched blue, belonging. They were waiting for carnage or Snuff. This is why they are born To begin with, to end. Ruminants do not frighten At anything--gorge in the soil, butcher Noise, the mere graze of predators. All about Carrowmore The rain quells for three days. I remember how cold I was, the botched Job of traveling. And just so. Wherever I went I came with me. She buried her bone barrette In the ground's woolly shaft. A tear of her hair, an old gift To the burnt other who went First.
1997
Don’t do that when you are dead like this, I said,
Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.
I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.
Mostly meat to be sold there; mutton hangs
Like laundry pinkened on its line.
And gold!—a chalice with a cure for living in it.
We step over the skirt of an Elizabeth.
Red grapes, a delicacy, each peeled for us—
The vestments of a miniature priest, disrobed.
A sister is an old world sparrow placed in a satin shoe.
2013
Winter was the ravaging in the scarified
Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare
Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel
Of kith at the fieldstone wall, annulled
As a dulcimer cinched in a green velvet sack.
To be damaged is to endanger—taut as the stark
1997