After long naps, the children on beach vacation

sip Dr. Chek and wonder why they’re eating

hot dogs for breakfast. The black cherry cola

stains their mouths awestruck. Somewhere

“Magic Mountain Pkwy—2 miles,” the green sign jeers.

There’s barely time to veer far right, and claim

last place in a line of cars that seems stopped

dead. Still, slow as a fault, we grind ahead.

let’s flay it open: find the tea

in tear and moan in lemon

the obsession in the one obsessed

with sectioning the body into inside and

the “wordless thing” that covers it

Taking with you some memory of the crabapples.

Of London and the cemetery fog. You

in a corner of the room, looking out

the bay window with all the nearly-

Drawbridges over the Seine steam up and down

levitating over long fly-boats that ply the flashing

waters which all day transport oil slicks of guilt

and all night spin black whirlpools of doubt.

Abandoned in that maze, raised by those walls.

Quarry must be, from the start, to hunt

the raw block you seek, the translucent

skin, the span without fault, the clear

milk-white eye of myth. Stone that will hold

There is a woman who whistles

from the arroyo— oh hollow bone

you have a body

you cannot carry alone.

I wake on this path of this path supine beneath swaying fronds and boughs

with the woman watching me and over me wondering at our fled cities our myriad parents all younger now than we

Laugh But the jaws of the drugged tiger will equal the sage friendless on her brilliant point

Wind will batter the tents and awaken the one who peers out for the storm but meets stars only

Bright with light, the flag

ripples on the Jumbotron

as they ask those who’ve served

Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale


And so, he declared, the Arno, plague of mirrors, another –
river of suicides. You almost hallucinate. The air
and we in it, wedged in the beeswax of the clay-built corners. The streets’
recesses hemorrhage with summer light. So many

Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale


To extinguish the lamp and the bright words.
The vase stares flush against its own bottom.
At the foot of the bed jazz flares up,
opening a crack

Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale


In old age (so think thirty year olds) there is beauty.
Crystals of sugar melting – the city
lights are extinguished. Resignation,
the road slows down departing into the muggy flourlike fog

Even the interstate cries out of silence, hovering under

the floodlights and puddles of gasoline burning the moon.

Someone is leaving this city forever. And someone is

driving the Sauvie Island beaches where girls walk naked

The name spoke of sharp light
gathered around stones and cast up

against the undersides of aspen
leaves or carried for miles

its note is not disagreeable though loud –
- Meriwether Lewis, first written description of the magpie

Magpies like the one the Corps
sent back to Monticello
in a cage made of sticks and hide

What guilt, to see a bird in a building

and rejoice a moment: vessel of the air

I long to breath – but caught, desperate,

lunging. A bird is bound so firmly to place: