Today there’s supposed to be a break
This riverbend must have always been lovely.
When you set out to find your Northwest Passage
Burglars enter an apartment and ransack drawers;
Consider how smart
As dawn breaks he enters
Woolgathering afternoon:
We were knee-deep in packing paper when the cherub’s head fell off.
Saying the words My father died
It must be easier if one believes
The rich men, they know about suffering
My anonymous hour opens with a prayer
A shore of washed stones
That a cardinal’s bright dart alights upon the branch
I drove in snow to Clinton.
What we don’t know we don’t know,
You and I, when we sleep, we’re like whales
Buster Keaton’s every move strikes
With a wing cocked towards a lit lamp,
he doesn’t let the herd eat the forsythia but
After agony had left his body to find another,
Never the bark and abalone mask
He limps into the barn
A real one wouldn’t need one,
Sometime soon after the embers cooled,
Mr. Poe sits in Mrs. Shelton’s parlor, freshly
We’ve come back to the site of her
You’ve made your bed they said
Late November afternoon.
He struggles into his borrowed human skin,
After I failed calculus, my father,
There are men awed
We can talk to one another on telephones
Nefertiti means “The Beautiful One Has Come”
Fear passes from man to man
When the person with the loupe was assigned
Up the cutbank of a creek named after stone,
I want to be the transport ship
whose rolling eye is as loving as a mother’s.
Kissinger in black-tie shuffles to the town car
They came for land. For hog-high wheat to Dixon, Weeping
In one field, husks, muscadine vines & a sugarcane graveyard furrow acres aching for the devil to beat his wife.
At Memory Hill to spread lilies on daddy’s grave,
Meandering Neandertals
He walks into a thin morning
The hummingbird hovers over bougainvillea, darting in and out
A new “department.” A gray hive
They will be gone by now, the blind lottery sellers of Athens, swept from the streets in time for the Olympics.
These rooms of wood, of tongue-and-groove, open out
So the free may remain free
At the age of ten you will be allowed
This week the letter from my mother
A woman writes to ask
there are still the bad dreams I have to say
What is mysterious about loss,
When, as our line of divers squeezed
A measurement of time
It used to be that I was the prize
“Yuck,” you heave in front of that sick boy
What walls and gables, wonders still of workmanship.
On the radio a choir was singing
“Peace,” says the soprano,
The glory that has been evenly split
On the front step my Grandpop strained to hear
January saying summer, the news
Hide every distant thing,
The tiny wren perched on your hand
I spent a long time falling
I’d cut the prologue, where God agrees
It was clear she had carefully considered
On the lightning-struck pin oak,
Strung with whistle bones, frail reeds fledged, a bird
At Uncle Li’s
We sit by the window
Tentative, greedy, by night they came,
They stand scattered and not
In woods and lakes, car boots, freezers, huts,
I keep a little Lear in my back
Lost in the woods with an air rifle,
Having seared the sky, the sun—a brazier—
I remember, before the snow started,
I awoke as from a dream. And I rose
I was merely on
They’ll chew you up
The boys are hungry
Open your bedroom window in the heart of winter.
U’s mate, O with a new root,
Two bourbons past the funeral,
The clock in the heart of town
My own personal map of America on the back of the airplane seat
This is the time of day we hear them coming back,
That silly retriever.
Just wait a while and the water will run clear,
I found a picture of you
Here not waterfalls: scrubby plats of gorse and heather
I wake up in the dark with my head knocking
a beautiful hours, very well
A fingerprint on air
You loved your daily bout
The whole village walks the hard pack
Spring and the come-back glow
When I lifted my hand to brush it away,
I had been continuing to do the same thing
All day I have been thinking about the tide—
The little boy who snuggles next to me
No blue beckons so much as chlorine blue,
Whether it speaks
A pentecost of bloom: all the furred tongues
Yes, whales. The first time that I heard them breathing,
Your hand on my jaw
Let’s turn back into the blaze without shovels, let’s ask the fox
I’m in the upper field again
plump mother-lode of pleasure
Jerk that bitch, urges my guide,
The Christmas tree comes down
Cool air arrives, sounding in high parts of the huge silvery plane tree
the simple way the beach has
Tonight I can’t remember why
Continued soggy in the personal today
Body be dream
Take two flights of stairs.
As nomads camp where others camped before,
Deborah wasn’t a Jew, and then
In blunder of dusk I negotiate rush hour
Why now do I care to look—
All May, and everywhere
Now you’re a buddy mucking
I sit in the garden listening
My love is like a deep and placid lake...
Like the Soviets, my body had a plan
A young woman is walking with her boyfriend, and it’s deep
You are a wretch and a leech and a dirty
Dad who thinks life is a paper bag
“To be with a koan,”
Persistence has lent this tall white pine
Don’t try this at home. On second thought, come in,
A strong, pale wind on the thighs,
I saw him as I drove by—
October 11, 1963:
Today, when I woke up, I asked myself
Alone I sailed.
What led you down, first mother, from the good
If it’s the title of a movie, you expect
The vultures of this landscape came to call
A horrific scene: helpless in his passion
Art can make war look wrong, but most of the time
knock on wood
Piney woods
Rain against the roof sounds like a slow tire
We were born in the light
People are compelled to be together good and bad.
We will go to God
It didn’t behave
I needed fox Badly I needed
No sky a gray backdrop merely and absence
It’s the sort of painting I could never stand—
Effortlessness, I learn again,
Assume, dear vagabond, you are permitted
Driving the mountain with the windows down
In a nest no bigger than the breast pocket
I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere
The bed is fissured with shadow.
The mourning dove’s call woke me
The vast sadness of my family
Here’s a plain pile of sand.
From flowering gnarled trees
Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,
What he said was vast, given his limits.
Scuba divers will sometimes drown
We dressed for church. I had a white hat
Abstain from staring too long at the sky.
A bird’s building I don’t know what
We passed the baby over the bed, and later we passed tissue,
hey music and
Now this big westerly’s
I’ve learned nothing. It was with me
We’ve all been in towns
It wasn’t the river coming into me
When Sulis rose from the open ground
for over an hour we watched
April 8th out my upstairs window.
It was her first time coming home from college.
Dickey’s death feels all over me.
You know those people who are uncomfortable
Unreal precision of the houses at first light
A tall slender man sits at a rolltop desk
Honey I am one gorgeous permanent wave
Not pushing a rock—
It keeps on happening again and it will
It used to be simple:
Deep in the heart of every child, every mother, every spectator,
Oh fire—you burn me! Ed is singing
It’s stringy out here
Under Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at Saint Louis
In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs
If memory has a center, let it be here.
The cat purrs us awake, pawing the pillow,
Dear Mei Ling: We don’t know how you became a self-righteous, left-wing vegan
I saw a vast ocean on which sailed the fleets of every navy that had ever been. The ocean was still too vast for them. The fleets were specks of color on a canvas that was light and movement. Years and months fell like snowflakes.
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Joshua Keiter 