Winter flowers droop
to her nods, suspended there
inside pain’s headshop.
Edison
Here, gods extinguish
a light whenever a lineman
drops dead on the job.
New Brunswick
The voice of Black Horse
a logbook of old sorrows
lives beside the river.
Jersey Avenue
White ice in the trees
mute cathedral. Her dark skin,
her dark eyes, bright mouth.
Princeton Junction
I glimpse happiness
heading the other direction
sometimes, not quite here.
Trenton
I missed my stop
looking at heartbreak, the sky
almost criminal.
Early Uncollected
Mississippi John Hurt
Now the disorder of your words
makes some lavender sense
a knife-edge of seeing.
Birds meditate on powerlines
over Red Rocks, quills
ravel into a drift of muscle,
& your fingers swear
they’d die if they couldn’t
touch a guitar. Some surprise
bursts under your breath
boils of honey.
Langston Hughes
Those days when Jesse B.
Semple was quick to say,
“You can take the boy
outta the country …”
Joplin, Lawrence, Lincoln,
all left watermarks: an eye
of habit from turning up hems
& talking at the bottom of blue.
Agate polished itself
as this word weaver
groped for a foothold
in the boneyard,
watching hypnotic bird
voices condense in spoons.
A greenhorn among zoot-suited
swingers who danced with skirts
lost in a glare of horns
as long chains flowed out of empty pockets.
Blue Tonality
No, not Sprung Rhythm.
That guy with Thunder
Smith on Gold Star
who said, “I was born with the blues.”
After mile-long cotton rows
& Blind Lemon Jefferson
at The Rainbow,
he’d touch the strings
& know every note in the groin.
Catgut & a diamond needle
cut grooves in race records—
the flatted thirds, twelve
bars of flesh idiom.
De Síntoma Profundo
We inherited more than body language.
Pantomimic ghost flowers & sones:
our hands tied through gray weather
refuse to salute treadmill foremen.
Some waltz backwards off bridges,
& others sleepwalk to Solzhenitsyn’s
State Department communiqué.
My mind’s on Americus,
Georgia. Caught up in paperwork
of murder & audio surveillance,
weapons experts tread air
in oxblood Bostonians.
—for Nicolas Guillen
Lover
A turning away from flowers.
A cutting out of
stone understands, naked
before the sculptor.
I watch you down Telegraph Avenue
till you sprout into a quivering
song color.
But I hope you fall
from your high horse
& break your damn neck.
Reminiscence
I had brainphotos
of riding you down into music.
I tried to kiss you back then,
but didn’t know the sweet
