Reading & Books

I was thinking of some of the messages Rilke will never receive: — dentist called abt your appt tomorrow…

1
Sunday      vellum tongues with words of prayer
Monday    messages from the unknown
Tuesday     how to…

The young man says, “Alan can 
do anything he wants”

“Not fly,” I say

The young man returns 
a puzzled look…

Reading a kind of  laborious
poem about rural things
and a horse is shot
for breaking its leg.
I still don’t get it.
Surely there’s a way
to heal a horse.
I text my friend
who is a farrier
(you know—
someone who shoes horses)
I say surely there’s a way
to...

In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.

Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own...

I am
a product
of my time.
Time is a body
that resembles
a sound without a scale.
Forever foreclosed fortitude.
In heaven, the dinner bell rings
as elegy. The porch-light stars turn
on their mothering moths. Betrayal
takes at least two, and wherever two
or more are gathered, I am...

you know I ain’t mess w/you ’cause of yo’ friends
wouldn’t have you caught slummin’
know you hood 'cause you said

I look the same
and I said
you look the same

and I said “it don’t crack, doit?
and you said “Uh, OKAY?”

that’s that thing right...

i.I am in the middle of “The Fourteen Poems" by Sun Bu-er (“Clear and Calm Free Human”), Taoist and one of the Seven Immortal Sisters who took up the Tao after she turned fifty-one, after her three children grew up,...

        The heart, it hoards—
how I know this—

The small, strangled
        shining room Keats lost
his life in—and to—

beyond the window sunlight
        arranging itself
on the Spanish Steps

while the poet watches.
        Outside, snapshots
of the tourists

& teenagers tired
        of what they don’t
know yet. What will

become of us? Ash.
        Unasking. The...

I slip into my insolence, sleek as an eel.
I have walked so many ways around God I can tell you
Holiness is a roundabout
With a thousand exit points labeled doubt;
Like the boy who unzipped my pants
In my sleep, who broke the...

A lover undresses, with permission.
Picture the body becoming real.

                      I picture becoming real intimate.
It is strange to think of legs as closed.

                        I open my legs for strangers. I widen,
stretch. What belongs here? Don’t say a door.

Instead of belonging, I eat the...

I lift him out, whole and perfect.
Said told me he would be here, chained by Dante
To the eighth circle of hell, bettered only by the devil himself.
The Paris Review recapped this canto in 2014, saying
Read along! This week: Mohammed torn...