Poems

Hooded eyes, eyelashes thinning, she tailgates a semi,
keeping up with him in case she breaks down.
The truckie has her measure in his rear-view mirror –

In the beginning he’d herd people
clocking up the hours in apartments
above and below him but they heard sink
and shower sounds and turned on washing
machines that spurted later while he was
on the job he’d reconsider part one of
his partner’s apparent lack of funding
proposal paperwork a black mark

To touch death in this manner: if our fingertips could pierce
that airless element, the body
breathing calm within its envelope of gas …

Morning took me to the jetty.
I saw the moon jellyfish pulse toward the air:
as their edges broke that barrier, the briefest spark appeared.

So there he was in the library, crouched above the floor
      like a mousetrap, squinting into his rickety parallel edition
of the Satires. The paperback was from the late fifties;