Poetry

He tells me the first dead body 
he ever saw was not 
in a box, but 
hanging from a tree. Seventeen,

On the train to the museum, at the Embarcadero stop with my father, I start to get 
emotional. Tender as ever, having told a woman who loves me I cannot, or can no 
longer, love her.

In the occupied West Bank 
two doctors enter a prison:

one the jailer, one the jailed. 
The jailer walks in. His colleague

Overhead the Kentucky sky was clear and went on forever. I don’t really remember how we parted or where I went after, only that he wanted to stay awhile, that at some point he hugged me, tucked a cig behind his ear, and started down toward...

A friend from one of those Shithole places tells me 
she’s worried. Am I sick? Depressed? I’ve lost 
my mischievous smile. She’s listened to my laments: 

I drive out Old Frankfort Pike past the ditch 
by the creek where you pulled off on New Year’s Day 
to pick from the mud that Jack Russell 
with swollen nipples and bring her back to the farm.

When I was my dad’s magic helper, disappear 
was only a verb: He’d make a penny 
disappear—

Every piece in its frame, behind glass, is really two works. There’s the rayograph, its vaporous, everyday shapes drifting across the once light-sensitive paper. And over it, caught in the glass, a spontaneous portrait of the viewer...

What could the social club have done
to be chosen as the first bomb’s target?

What could the shoe shop have done
to be torched to the ground?