RUMMAGING ABOUT

You find a knife

So sharp 

It cuts infinity

In half

Leaving two things 

Both infinite.

Soon you've a sea

Of tiny infinite things 

All of them 

Insisting you

Must take care of them.

SINCE

By now the men

Standing around the fire 

Must have noticed Spring

Is decades late, the fire 

Doesn't burn out and I 

Am standing there, waiting   

To be shooed away or

To take my place with them.

BUDDENBROOKS

Reading the book 

I see my father 

Reading it. He is

Younger than I am

And has a yellow pad

Next to his elbow

(Of course he does;

Where else for 

Stray thoughts,

Written in pencil?)

He notes the same figure

I do now, candlelit,

Stepping from a tapestry 

Then back.

UNWELL

Illness makes me 

Attenuate and

Inhuman. 

Imaginary nuns

Gather to debate

What's to be done.

They carry me

To an intersection

Fifty years ago

Where a fire burns

In a trash barrel.

"If he looks left

Or right to see

Who else is there 

He may be saved."

CRITICS

In Ohio, glaring down the length 

Of her interminable drive, she thinks 

"He is writing again about Verlaine's 

Miscarried brothers who were kept

On a kitchen shelf by their mother!"

Her small cat, to soothe her, offers

To reveal the name Achilles used

When he lived among the women but

She's known it since she was sixteen: 

Pyrrha, the Redhaired girl.

SISTER

Verlaine's mother noticed
A new tinted bottle
Among those which housed
Her four unborn sons.
When Verlaine reeled home
He said necessity had made him,
Pawn one of his brothers
But, being once more in funds
 He'd returned to redeem him.
Offered two labeless bottles
He took both  of them home.
"You didn't notice one was a girl?"
"As the drunken glory of French poetry
I never vote or pay taxes
Or concern myself with infant genitalia."

BEFORE

In the dark air angels hang

Not knowing this feeling 

Is uncertainty. One of them 

Reaches a hand out to see

If a weapon appears in it

Or a harp or another hand.

Harbonah, angel of confusion,

Thinks of trading his second job

As patron of mule drivers 

With Shakziel, ruler

Of bugs who live on water.