running fingers through your hair, thin as feathers

Once you wore a bomb suit.
The Navy paid you extra.
Once you took me to the club.
I stayed the nights thereafter.
Once we shopped for light bulbs
together. I could have married it,
I confessed.

Once we were chopping onions.
The carbon blade. The nakedness.
The white pale of my throat.

good people on both sides

a cento

My dear trees, I no longer recognize you
The storm puts its mouth to the house
The barbed wire, the plaster, the fallen windows
They have cut off the water in the sinking metropolis
An odor stayed in the cane fields
The moon from any window is one part
And night and distant rumbling; now the army’s
Here in this ordinary house
A potato explodes in the oven. Poetry and famine
Brother, today, I’m sitting on the stone bench outside our house
Look at the sky. Is there no constellation
Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in Charlottesville
Everything has ended, I said

Lines taken from the following, in order of appearance:
“Emily’s Theme,” Charles Simic
“A Winter Night,” Tomas Tranströmer
“Compromises,” Yannis Ritsos
“Water Crisis,” Carolyn Forché
“The Dictators,” Pablo Neruda
“The Moon From Any Window,” Li-Young Lee
“The Last Evening.” Rainer Maria Rilke
“Blood,” Lucille Clifton
“An Atlas of the Difficult World, vi,” Adrienne Rich
“For My Brother, Miguel,” César Vallejo
“Sonnets to Orpheus, 11,” Rainier Maria Rilke
“Umbrian Dreams,” Charles Wright
“A sentence,” Louise Glück

November 30, 2025