Poems

The Cost of VisionTo see farther than the people standingin your immediate vicinityis a kind of lonelinessthat comes with a specific dignity. You build for outcomes nobody around you can yet picture,explain yourself to no one,just proceed through every stricture. The cost of vision is the isolation of the seeing—being years ahead of where the […]

The CostNobody put it on the invoice and nobody explained—all the things you’ll have to give away for everything you gained:the midnight hours and the friendships that grew thin around the edges,the conversations that you cut short standing out on all those ledges. I paid the cost in increments so small I did not feel

The Compliance Fracture The cardboard edges bite like teeth into my sweaty palmsA thirty-pound delivery of institutional psalmsI’m hauling the bureaucracy in a heavy double stackWhile the weight of the prevention is snapping out my backThe ink is full of warnings and the paper is a wallBetween the man who’s walking and the man about

The Complicated Terrain (Pink Floyd Style) There is a terrain that only the complicatedDesire occupies, the terrain createdBy the mixed feelings and the contradictionsOf wanting things in opposite directionsAt the same time, the complicated terrainIs its own country with its own rain The complicated terrain, I’ve set up campThe complicated terrain, the signal dampWith mixed

The Casket Was ClosedThey asked us at the funeral home and we said yes—we thought it better, thought the last memory we hadof him alive was cleaner than the pressof seeing what the final weeks had made of Dad. The closed lid held the possibilityof him as he was at his best, not at his

The Campaign in the DarkThere are campaigns nobody sees,nobody measures,nobody reports on—fought in the interiorwithout a single witnessto testify from the front lines. These are the wars against the aspectsof yourself you have not resolved,against the limitationsyou have carried and not dissolved. I have fought two of these.The first came in my late twenties,when the

The Cancer Diagnosis She said the word and the room rearranged itself around the word,The objects in the room stayed where they were but I heard,Them settle into new positions in the gravity of it,The lamp, the window, the desk where she was sitting at the bit. I had known something was wrong in the

The Calendar of NumbHe marks the days the way a man marks time in a sentence —one hash mark at a time, with the particular penanceof the hours being there to be inhabited and discharged.The calendar of numb runs from the small to the enlarged. Five and two: the ancient inventory of the working life,the

The Bone OrchardBeneath the grass the bones are stacked like firewood,the cemetery subdivided, the neighborhoodof the dead grown cramped—femurs touching femursin the soil where the worms run through like rumors. The oldest bones are powder now, the calcium returningto the earth that lent it, and the slow and patient burningof the mineral back to mineral—the

The Borrowed Enthusiasm I walked into that room running on empty—the whole afternoon had been the simply-getting-through, the bare minimum managed,the enthusiasm: banished.But the room had it—four people deepin something they actually cared about, the sweepof the genuine moving through the air like weather.I stood at the edge and pulled myself together. The borrowed enthusiasm