October 2024
Bio Note: Two of my poetry collections, A Boat That Can Carry Two (2011) and Talk (2019) were published by Bordighera Press. A third, The Empty Field, was published in 2022 by Red Moon Press. Born and raised in New Jersey, I’m currently a senior lecturer in the English department at The Ohio State University in Columbus.
Crow
There is no province but the liminal. Past
the thicket, a patch of grey. Before that,
green branches balance in the rain,
or not in the rain. Or not in the rain.
A chance crow stitches the patchwork shut.
Or maybe words fail and neither rain
nor branches nor grey patch remain.
Just the rain. Or sky. Please don’t
think it matters where and when.
Silence grows as the crow glides through,
or a different crow, or the same in a different
direction. I could go on and on like this
forever, dodging rain among the branches,
on the wings of a crow – not a crow but a raven.
On the Great Wall
Rows of corn basking in the late summer
sunlight, every day is a death. I’m the small
hooded pilgrim in a Bosch landscape, roaming
west toward a woman I want to love but can’t.
September in my hands, Dylan in my ears.
I’m alone on a bus in the Indiana night.
The bus has stopped in those rows of corn
for no reason. I’ll come back when I’m older,
as the saying goes, but not much smarter.
Oh clock of love calculating the Great Wall
where I once wept, I want to be the weather
of all readiness. I have, I have, I have not yet
begun to live. I’m a hooded pilgrim in the night.
Love, absolve me of the need for love.
Pareidolia
after Antonio Machado
What you’re seeing is yourself seeing yourself
seeing yourself, and so on, ad infinitum, but
not in any practical sense. Remember that
they’re already in your mind, waiting to be
dragged into the world of dangerous language.
These are eyes that see, this is the mouth
that speaks a decipherable dialect – so simple!
Dress it up, take it home, share it with your friends.
Who were you when you began to see shadows
on the wall and knew they were another you?
Who were you when you began to write poems?
Why did you write poems? Why did you stop
(as Bly once sighed)? The face you see is not a face
because you see it, it’s a face because it sees you.
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