Read an Excerpt
Elegy for a Broken Machine
My father was trying
to fix something
and I sat there just watching,
like I used to,
whenever something
went wrong.
I kept asking where he’d been,
until he put down a wrench
and said Listen:
dying’s just something
that happens sometimes.
Who knows
where that kind of dream comes from?
Why some things
vanish, and some
just keep going forever?
Like that look on his face
when he’d stare off at something
I could never make out
in the murky garage,
his ear pressed
to whatever it was
that had died—
his eyes listening for something
so deep inside it, I thought
even the silence,
if you listened,
meant something.
*****
Old Love
You, lovely beyond
all lovely, who
I’ve loved since I
first looked into
your blue
beyond blue eyes,
are no longer
anywhere on earth
the girl these words
call out to,
though never, since,
have I not been
a darkening wood
she walks through.
*****
The Guitar
It came with those scratches
from all their belt buckles,
palm-dark with their sweat
like the stock of a gun:
an arc of pickmarks cut
clear through the lacquer
where all the players before me
once strummed—once
thumbed these same latches
where it sleeps in green velvet.
Once sang, as I sing, the old songs.
There’s no end, there’s no end
to this world, everlasting.
We crumble to dust in its arms.