Oh how I rejoice that you are sky and kaleidoscope that you have so many artificial stars that you glow in a monstrance of brightness, when I place your perforated half-globe over my eyes under the air. How unstrained in…
So many slopes they touched, and once leaned outside while I tromped into the parlor of an alpine monastery, clattering boots, my bluster welcomed to dine silently with the brothers who had also vowed to get to the powder of what is daily fused with life: to glide, to carve, to schuss and float with…
I like parking at the big box store, watching people come out and go in. Swaying winter grasses in the median, sky that brigand Saturday blue. I’m waiting to pick up my son from his guitar lesson. Already masterful, he doesn’t quit. Even Jimi Hendrix continued with a vocal coach, up to the very day…
Our bones will touch in the water one day after the supernova, or maybe it’ll be an Electromagnetic Pulse we bought the old Volvo to outsmart— we escaped the need for computers to govern coffee makers, and made our own kombucha— but one by one the streaked coyotes, wimpled foxes picked off the rooster and…
He was born in 1886 in Armenia, in a remote mountain village called Pingyan above the Aradzani River. It was not the typical Armenian village of the Ottoman Empire, subjugated by Turkish authorities and terrorized by marauding Kurdish tribes in the guise of tax collectors. Pingyan was an unusual place: it was secure and very…
To my friend Kegham Parseghian With what intoxication! The trees, in the light, Trees in the wind and the rain, Shaggy-tressed trees, trees that to the heavens strain, And saplings green, as sea waves Collapsing to the bosom of the corn strewn, Dazed, all drink of the swelling sunburst of life. With what intoxication! The…
There’s only one time when you were perfect for loving in life, and if you miss that time, if you ignore it or pass it by, you’ve really missed something. James Salter I Autumn wind, the leaves a golden mash at our feet in the kind, quiet blaze of the streetlight; I am taking your…
1 Above deck, ice-scarred, off to Albion. ___ Let it be named so, for the dynastic furies combed into heads, pressed into lines of boys shouting ‘here, sir,’ and ‘not here, sir’ at devotion or on the parade ground, leaping over shadows as the sea broke with their names interred in the same roster,…
The bars long since closed when the shouting begins down the street Open the fucking door and all my old selves leap to their feet sick with adrenaline rushing to the point of convergence where things go bad. With repetitive force the voice assumes a switched-on hydraulic quality a monotony allowing…
They appear out of nowhere as if they know where all the doors are between our dimension and where they are called by their true name, are not the last survivors of their evolutionary niche. Familiarity does not diminish their curiosity, and even the great plain aligned to the grid of monoculture is not monotony,…
I signed the papers, and the world created out of all I have destroyed honestly doesn’t look much different. A grainy whitish wind blows in from Little Poland, and a human form in heavy gear screams unanswerable questions into traffic. Questions, while inadequate to truth, are faithful to sorrow, so fair enough. Inside…
I can’t make it right. Not the shadow lying on the snow, not the snow, terrain sloping crudely toward the poor outcome of a structure neither representational nor abstract, and the sketched-out town beyond ill-proportioned, depthless, and basic. There isn’t any sense of an origin, of what Plato called the lower soul, to animate what’s…
