Negative

night watch

You can fall in love
in a museum, but only

with the art
or its silence—or the stranger

you don’t mean to follow

suffering past the Old Masters
& the unnamed

servants. Rembrandt’s face
half in shadow—

you can fall for what
isn’t there already, or

with the 13th century—the...

is music    is men
off early from work    is waiting
for the chance at the chair
while the eagle claws holes
in your pockets    keeping
time    by the turning
of rusty fans    steel flowers with
cold breezes    is having nothing
better to do    than guess at the years
of...

This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...

we are not that kind of country.

We are sanctuary for the hungry,

the homeless, the huddled,

held together by an idea

our immigrant fathers believed in.

Rendered, it meant independence.

Pursued, it kindled war, ordinance,

a fighting chance. Forty thousand

musket balls, by themselves, did not

shape the...

Come in, Maxim!... This is Minsk
choked under a pillow of clouds.
 
There’s you: a statue in a heavy coat.
Here all monuments wear coats
 
not wool, but linden bark coats
with bee fur collars.
 
In their pockets monuments keep belts.
And under collars monuments have necks.
 
In...

We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.

We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...