Poetry

& my memories of you are thin as cotton worn with age / & soft / & blurred from too much touching too much wear

Pink millions of passenger pigeons slammed the sun shut again and again for fifty thousand years. Above the Ohio River, a solar eclipse for three days straight as one flock passed over. 

of the dead a million years of age-related faults / danger war hunger lust the extinct fallen stars / everything living falters is always on the verge

Will Smith plays a cop in this movie. We watch him on the couch, your baby sister and I. She, who was not yet born when I knew you best. The speakers make such deafening sound. Subwoofer. A thought couldn’t be had if you begged it.

Where you are going
you cannot take
your things leave
in this locker the rivets
at the corners of your blue
jeans

There are so many things a body
can collect into itself
milk of a mother in a cup of coffee

Two Cooper’s hawks on an electric pole, facing
opposite directions. The larger bird hopped up to the 

top as I neared. I stood there until my eyes hurt.
Our eyes must be on loan. When we die, we 

have mercy nothing
prepared my body to lose its
brother nothing prepares a grown man to fall

The tops of the buildings were shorn. So I walked
down Market Street to see if I could find them. 

The fog tried to take my head off. I was so scared on
some parts of Market that I stayed a few feet behind 

In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness
he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather
thrashing in a gravel bed.