Paul's Tattoo (audio only)
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The Owner of the Night
interrogates whoever walks
this shadow-lane, this hour
not reserved for you: who
are you to enter it?
Orion’s head over heels
above the road, jewel-belt
flinting starlight
to fuel two eyes looking
down from the air:
beacons in reverse,
since light pours in
toward her appetite
until she wings her noiseless outline
between our rooftop and the stars,
over this door and all the doors
hidden in the grass:
dreaming voles,
firefly province,
2017
Brian Age Seven
Grateful for their tour
of the pharmacy,
the first-grade class
has drawn these pictures,
each self-portrait taped
to the window-glass,
faces wide to the street,
round and available,
with parallel lines for hair.
I like this one best: Brian,
whose attenuated name
fills a quarter of the frame,
stretched beside impossible
legs descending from the ball
of his torso, two long arms
springing from that same
central sphere. He breathes here,
2016
Little George
barks at whatever’s
not the world as he prefers to know it:
trash sacks, hand trucks, black hats, canes
and hoods, shovels, someone smoking a joint
beneath the Haitian Evangelicals’ overhang,
anyone—how dare they—walking a dog.
George barks, the tense white comma
of himself arced in alarm.
At home he floats
in the creaturely domestic: curled in the warm
triangle behind a sleeper’s knees,
wiggling on his back on the sofa, all jelly
2016