​Gross Anatomy
              —after judging a poetry contest for medical students
 
                                     It is difficult
             to get the news from poems
                         yet men die miserably every day
                                     for lack
             of what is found there.
                                     —William Carlos Williams
 
Half their poems are sick from watching,
for the first time, someone die, pale
and helpless amid the drone and drip
 
of machines, and the rest suffer
the thing itself, the empty hands, blue
as Dührer’s, into which they place again,
 
in their minds and on paper, the toys,
roses, and other hands they once held.
But though they saw open the skull,
 
raise the pate on its waste-bin hinge,
lift out the brain, and stare into the bowl
where they imagine memories still float
 
like petals on dark water, and though they
“crack” the chest with a melon sound, lift
and weigh the liver and lights, and hold
 
in their hands the heavy heart,
it’s the shrunken sex and withered breasts
that prove too much for ones so young,
 
and impel them to try and tell, witness
to what they have seen.  And so they write
it down, send it off, then wait to hear
 
that it has won, for how can it miss
since it really happened, even the names— 
embolism, arteriovenus, curettage— pure poetry.




​
Blind Pass


I arrive before sunrise
at the empty beach
of this pass,
once clogged,
now dredged of silt
like a cleared throat
so redfish, trout, snook
can move from sea to bay
and back,
following the pull of the moon
and tides.

A line of herons stilts the shallows
like the first alphabet,
a V of pelicans glides
just barely above the swells,
and ospreys whistle over
the voice of the waves.

It takes a sort of faith
to cast into the darkness
for what has been there before
and still may be,
to listen to what can't be seen,
a leaden loneliness to go deep,
a readiness to pull
from somewhere
beneath the surface
what is about to happen
and be known.





The Bodies of Poets
 
 
If only I could floss my liver
tonight, or tomorrow whip
my heart to a peg-leg beat along
a one-lane country road, that strip
of lonely grass in the middle, set
my eyes to the shape of trees at twilight. 
If only there were rain enough
to blur things right,
a streetlight-steady yellow moon,
or wind to hollow my head to an empty shell
for a foghorn full of the ocean's greatest hits,
what we couldn't do, we two, or stories tell,
if only I could wake all night to write
and then not lumber around all day
but up-buck, back-bounce limber
over all the stony ways
of words, each cobble like
a little skull of doubt
in roads that squirm and bend
to just more tangled lines about
getting lost or heading for a certain end.
If only I could swallow sleeping like a seed,
Grow dreams that someday warm someone,
succeed twisting tongue around a truth
to make it lasting as a lie,
continue in some speaking form,
so when I lay me down to die,
before I wake, I pray the world
forget my soul, but take
and eat this meat, this beat-up
sacrament, broken for my sake. ​