poetry: results 169–192 of 735

One star sharpens

and blindly pours out

all its death, one's pinned

open, a yellow surge

emerges in a slur

of eyes rolling back

pigeons startling out

gutted light nor dark

rubble and litter chimes

in the gut

an instance of

infinite idling

I've learned, has nothing

in common with the relentless

metronome of carpenter bees

ticking off the aluminum siding

like the steady hail of olive pits

spit through my open window

the summer I learned to shake

martinis without bruising the ice.

The human tongue, in disbelief, obsesses

at the tender pit of a tooth,

insists on entering the empty room again

and again until it cankers…

For ten days now, two luna moths remain

silk-winged and lavish as a double broach

pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin.

Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green

of copper weather vanes nosing the wind,

the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen's

green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore…

It's going to be another bad winter,

as in, not a good example of winter:

you can sit on the beach in November

with no coat.

This one's like tipping

your head back to take in the sky gone

shallow, dimensionless—shot

with no timestamp, the rule of threes.

Seesaw, seesaw. One is like dust.

Cricket legs/wings.

Forces sky down

like a French press

over the boil. Constant cloud

covers thunder—lightning

but no rain—a tease without

the reprieve of a drop—

lonely as the kiss you want

to, but don't need.

What sigh are you

keeping, well?

What reserve in store,

what cloud before you

reap? From the leavings

of whose field harvest

wind to speak?

In the spirit of breathing I

Am before the face of I

Am in the image still I

Must eat or wear out I

Sometimes I feel

like a dog in the sky,

                  a constellation of mostly not-me.

Your snout slit: biolology miff muff myth

      Up front: scent enter

      Aside: the slag

So as they say about shall the twins meet

      And say get yers from out my line

      And a line goes one way forever

so i got tethered to

the fixing of things—

funny this jar won't open hot

or cold, funny this engine

had more parts before i rebuilt it.

the newspaper smells like moth-balls & tells nothing.

chalk it up to _____.

everyday people get annoyed when _____.

just as the first dinner

after a difficult hour,

so with the wind's scratch & the calendar.

and i am less and less myself.

i speak it when memory fails

i speak it when the river touches my ankles—cold

and close to meaningless.

Dear Outlet,

Dear Honored Guest,

Mounded inside

in fits and starts.

Dear Plaque,

Dear Meatball,

Dear Attack—

Dear Jalapeno,

Dear Skeleton,

Dear Delight,

Dear Landslide—

This is the price

of a punch card

culture. Rip a few

mascots for the

bus ride over.

Dear Jalapeno,

Dear Vagrant,

The trees are making

fools of themselves.

I'm making faces

at the greedy river.

The sky spits

at us in our tiny

white hats.

Cyriack, this three years' day these eyes, though clear,

   To outward view, of blemish or of spot,

   Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;

   Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear

Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,

   Or man, or woman.

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs

   By the known rules of ancient liberty,

   When straight a barbarous noise environs me

   Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs …

what keeps you up all night

listening to the neighbor

call his cats in: oh the animals

we might choose to save, put them

on a polystyrene ark to Mars: what

we start that finishes us: the seventy-

four degree day in December: …

Your own body, broken into so many times, became a clear lake

for her to bathe in. Remember pulling the one tiny, suckering

leech from below her neck, the pale collarbone Braille it left.

The deer come out in the evening.

God bless them for not judging me,

I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe

and make strange noises at them—

                        language,

if language can be a kind of crying.

The poem about the sea

      speaks in braille

blue translated twice.

Sun wet light salt waves etc.