Hearing the News

It is like fire.
It is a kind of burning.
Silence moves through it
like breath. It goes nowhere.
Where it begins it
ends, a notion surrounding
itself like a ring of flame.
It is nothing you have not heard before.
It is the essence of sound.
Imagine yourself there, not
there. It is the light falling
without you through trees
whose voicelessness
embodies the idea of you,
a burning thing among trees.
The way without you nothing
speaks and nothing
answers. Someone who is not
named, who is not there. Or
something that falls and is
not heard for many years,
but whose name is a constant,
a whisper of itself
among trees. The way
a child might imagine his own
death, distant and luminous
as a star. And burning.

        —"Hearing the News" was first published in American Poetry Review.

************

Garden Party

The day makes its final appearance,
the sky rubbed out in places
with a blue so understated it's nearly
a memory of blue. Forget the vase
arranged on the table, the tulips
are too vague. Even the white
tablecloth is an erasure.
Imagine the pale drone
of dinner conversation,
the politics of brie, cold soup.
The good china infects everything.
Even now the knife falters,
the wine glass can't be saved.
Think of the blank mirrors
of spoons, the fish
whose whiteness is a given.
Consider the ravenous napkin.

        —"Garden Party" was first published in American Poetry Review.

************

Ambush


The room. The white piano.
The stars gone slack.
The unmistakable rising up
to meet her. In heels and
a dark suit. A green light. A wing.
An accomplice. Silence and
more. Not silence. The mandolin still
trembling, still holding its moan.
Scar of light on the page. The blade
of an old story. The hand, the voice,
the deep pocket. Whatever stars are left.
The map. The spit and polish.
The sky like a great pond.
The drift. The notion.
The wine with its warm hide.
The lavish hand grenade. The stars and more.
The cloud, its soft harness.
The well. The wound. The warning.

        —"Ambush" was first published in Gettysburg Review.