Between deep cornfields
grasping in tandem the gone 
sun, and power-lines
sloping to hold the weight of 
twilight—waxing gibbous moon.

Enclosures

Idiot music 
seeps from a third-floor window—

ripped screen flapping like 
a flag rotting in a field

of faded yellow stucco. 

*

To sit in a room
as June sun withdraws across

the ceiling and walls;
and to stay in the poem 

even as each word recedes. 

*

At night, the sound of  
water running in the creek 

behind the grotto
where Our Lady’s blue gaze cuts 

through moth-entangled spotlight.

Night Walk, Lower East Side 

A blue neon cross
flickers in the window 

of a Lutheran church 
on a graffitied corner 

in Chinatown.
That’s the anchor—

I hold it in mind. 
Not for holiness, 

but for symmetry. 
A compass 

to guide me 
through the city’s 

surging frequencies.
Darkness flowering 

out of an alley;
traffic glint

on barbed wire.

At Once

A thought collapses 
beneath the weight of

bird noise needling
the bedroom walls.

All of this green
breathing shadow

breathes summer 
all at once. I

enter a trance
tracing each trace.

Words, where
my mind nests,

return me to heart.

Field Note

Lilacs, chlorine, manure.
I walk through the coiled scent,
headless, a figment of early summer.
In the white and yellow wildflowers
bunched beside Fish Creek—
quick water hissing over rough stone slabs—
no thought churns. Like the dragonfly 
leaving a blue streak
suspended in its wake, I’m nothing 
but a raw nerve receiving a world.

On the Solstice 

Lightning stilts 
the gloam, lingers 
behind the eyes. 
A negotiation

between stasis 
and abrasion, 
petrichor 
and car exhaust, 

lends the weather 
its broken music. 
At dusk, I move 
through the room

or the room moves 
through me. 
Night falls 
into insect static. 

Air too thick to think. 
And the moon 
in a pool 
on old linoleum.

Unsigned 

Late May,

when heavy green 
begins to lean in—

green churning 
a deeper green—

and bees, fevered, 
needle haze

pulled tight
like a sheet

of clear plastic
across the field.

When it dissipates
I see the seams—

the dandelions 
that dot 

the sloped sides 
of the canal;

the ragged lilacs
my vision blurs;

the graffiti fading 
beneath the bridge.

What would it mean 
to have no need 

to speak it— 
to leave no mark

that signs a thing seen.
Late May, 

the heavy green
leaning in

to spill over. 

Shaker Cemetery

If not for the few stones 
cracked into arrowheads 

and stumps, the symmetry
would signal the eternal. 

After two-hundred years—
two-hundred winters—

what names and dates remain 
are faint indentations

the light can barely pronounce.

Margin Song

In the bardo between seasons—
I’m undone
in sudden April snow.
This thin static hinged 
to an ashen sun,
unwinding 
where the sky was. I look up
and the flurry falls through me. 

Holy Saturday 

It isn’t absence, 
this darkness. Suspended here,
speechless in the wake 

of the Word’s descent,
we become the tomb that waits 
to unveil itself

as vessel of light 
and light alone, the light
undying, we die 

to know.

March, Upstate 

All at once, 
the crash of birdsong 

becomes clear crystal 
revolving mid-air. 

A crystal
segmenting the new sun

into panes of sound. 
All at once, 

spring tangles 
the senses. 

The field melts 
into its reflection—

I walk the edge 
of an inverted world. 

Postscript

1

Ice-capped
mud-veined  
snowpack
quilted over 
an old battlefield 
struck by 
                 sun.

2

The long thaw begins
with a nonsense syllable 

echoing in dark  
woods. An animal shrieking 

as if shot up from the ground. 

Stride 

The freezing night 
seals a chamber

of wordless prayer 
between my mouth 

and hands. Wind 
kicks snowdrifts

into static; heavy 
pine boughs 

scaffold the dark. 
Leave it to late winter

to drown out 
an inner voice,

the mumbling locus 
of a poem.

That was a form 
of warmth, a small fire 

in the chest, a thing 
to conjure 

and watch over
as hours pass. 

Tonight, 
I take dictation

from without,
from lack, 

and lean 
into another gust.

A few windows 
along the road 

glow deep umber
and I hold the color

under my tongue 
until it dissolves. 

Polar Low

Half-sheathed in ice
a yellow double-wide trailer

mirrors the inarticulate morning. 
The amnesiac sun.

And nothing else
to contrast these variations of white

and thicket 
choked by thicket

in thin piles that dim the perimeter.

Every other noun 
frozen over.

Moonlight turns

the new snow
blue. A lawn 

hovering

in darkness—
radiant

with absence.

*

No difference now
between the field and river 
that runs beside it.
Both under new snow, the seams 
recede; my vision, weightless.

*

The day undone 
in gauze of rain 

on the brink
of snow. 

*

Silos like totems
in the snow and the stubble
of a dormant crop.

The Reprieve

A week
that freezes, thaws,
and freezes again.

The skyline scales
and cracks.
Morning’s frayed

gray plumes
pull through the wreck
and the wreck in mind.

To be reminded
there’s grace
in ordinary weather,

in the reprieve
from neon
and clouds low enough

to cloud thought. Grace
in daylight, the drowse
and sway;

and how, when it’s this
thin, things barely cling
to their names. Grace

to be nameless, a form
among forms, drifting
in January glare.

Grace, too,
when windows
reflect and distort,

at night,
the shape of a room.

The Turn

Awake in the pre-dawn dark
at the end of a difficult year,

I gather scraps from a notebook
to contain grief
in private speech.

The words repeat like a rosary: 

sun, silence, time,
light, day, pain. 

As if ink could snare a voice 
beyond me—for company—

and dissolve the “I”
in an image
at once blurred and vivid.

That was the vow and the dream.

Morning, bright now 
between the margins—

cloud, window, 
sparrow, rain—

at the end of a difficult year.

For the Winter Solstice

Snowbanks gleam 
against the withered sun. 

Shimmer of snowmelt 
on asphalt, freezing 

into cellophane sheets. 
I walk to write 

into the nameless
and return with a phrase 

to defy a speechless season. 

I belong here, dissolving
into the stray sounds 

of an Upstate expanse—

grave upon grave 
under ice.