Explore Poems: Midlife

I had a fellowship but lived poorly
On cheap beer and penny candy.
Later, a career of killing time.
But…

Woken again, this time by wings
scraping the air to pitch the warbler’s
heft from its tree. Its perch…

smiling at far end of table with friends I don’t know

newly wedded NYC looking down

taking turns holding…

The joke you hear today you’ll hear

Again next year again each ev-

ery birthday after    for the first…

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that...

    Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
                            the new streets…

letting  the words fly like smoke uncurling from our mouths
we lie in bed with dykes ten years our junior, make
pot heaps to share, sleep in the same flannel sheets,
plot colored artist collaborations underground and not top 40,
draw the constellations from...

We spend the evening listening to folk songs from the early 2000s. Make a stew. Cut carrots the color of Halloween or your brother’s nail polish. Rib eye and onions. Oyster mushrooms dug out of the earth by some guy...

Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so

out of character...

He takes me, his adult child swaddled in foreignness, to the southern provinces.

Opaque scenes unfold, here among people with whom I once belonged.

We walk streets lined with vendors and dappled plane trees.

Everything I reach for, he buys.

I record each parting hour...

The city budget squads have trimmed its hours.
“You can’t get in, just go home why don’t you.”
I couldn’t tell how old she was.
Chalky braids crisscrossed her head;
the trenchcoat bunched around her waist
like paper flowers, her bare legs
streaked pink.
She held a...

I was thinking of a son.
The womb is not a clock
nor a bell tolling,
but in the eleventh month of its life
I feel the November
of the body as well as of the calendar.
In two days it will be my birthday
and as...

And what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A Mist retreating from the morning sun,
    A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute's pause, a moment's thought;
    And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

What...

To have arrived here, weighed down with fistfuls
of calendar entries, unsuitably
boggle-eyed as if new—
so these are mountains,
there is horror, which is the subway line
where I may lay down my creed
and when will my breath stop
acidulating like this?
Exceed, said 27. In...

It was summer in Hokkaido.
           The forest stole the wind
           and I swallowed my footsteps.
           Nobody came to the springs.
           Butt naked I sat...

As winter went on, every morning’s spoon of buckwheat honey
resembled more the taste of that isosceles at midpoint
of your weight, its smell brought sweetly back the pendulum-like pace
moving us from windowsill to floor, from floor to bed, and back
to floor,...

I have scrawled audible lifelines along the edges
of the lint trap, dropping the ball of towel fuzz
in the blue bin lined with a thirteen-gallon bag.
My sons' wardrobes lounge on their bedroom floors,
then sidle down to the basement, where I look
forward...

Poised upside down on its duncecap,
a shrunken purple head,
True Blueberry,
enters its tightening frame of orange lip,
and the cream of a child’s cheek is daubed with
Zanzibar Cocoa, while
      Here at the Martha Washington
      Ice Cream Store
      we outdo the Symbolistes.
a fine...

Nihilism, but not in a negative
sense—such was his thought,
what else to call it? Like snow
inside a novelty snow globe,
 
vague possibility descended
from probability, descended
from likelihood and certainty.
Now not even air. Those great
 
words discussed in college—
truth, beauty, justice, which
had come to embarrass...

Cabbage—the first word put down
with his new pen, a trophy pen,
like a trophy wife, not cheap,
absurd to use a ballpoint pen
 
for a task like this, a challenge,
for which he’d also bought a new,
but antique, rolltop desk recently
restored, with matching chair,
 
also...