Bestiary: Poems

Refuse the old means of measurement. Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen. -From "Out West

I have never known a field as wild as your heart. -From "Love Poem: Centaur

You bear a sword and shield, remind me of her labor, her stoning gaze. What beast will your blade free next? What call will you loose from another woman's throat?

You grow. You are large. You are a 19th century poem. All of America is inside you, a catalogue of lives and land and burrowing things. -From "Catalogue

What the tongue wants. Supplication and the burn of crystals expanding. To be, always, a waxing, a waning, and, in waxing again, not ever the same. Waste and deferral. Accumulation and deferral. You are flesh, and you are water, though of the flesh, you are only muscle, and of the water, you are saltless and clean. Be a caution, a reckoning, be a thing that breaks before it bends.

You'd rather be a simpler animal.

Tumbling from what holds me to the world. / O, to do away with the meat and light of me.

The man feels his chest. Am I a ghost? His lungs reply: You are the bravest stone.

When did one season begin and another end? What branched like a nerve?

Love, how do I gain / what was lost in winter?