riley dog

A bird's cry cracks    open the day
My neighbor lifts    a basket of laundry
drapes a white blouse    I envy the way it hangs
empty    untethered    My father
once took me to a bee farm    pointing out clover
wheat straw    tarpaper rooflines    bees
body to body    a great whirring
combing the wet cells    Now he forgets
names    calls this morning to say he can't see
the finches at the feeder    nothing
but a faint rustling    watery daubs
of black and gold    All day    I think of him
the hovering birds    breaking seeds    unseen
feeding    the bees knotted together    soft thorax
and stinger    How quickly
things darken this heat    Shadows
split the maple    Kneeling on the lawn
I deadhead roses    With a penknife
cut raw white pulp    sun on the sound
of leaves    rustling brief need
which could be the wind    or his voice
as it passes    headed nowhere    gaining speed

96.  Surprise yourself when she asks why you like the smell of sex by saying
        it reminds you of where we come from.

24.  Awake to see the gray day gathered around hexagonal granite tower and
        wonder if this were war would one emplace there a gun turret?

25.  Feel the calluses on the palms of thought and know them as words—but
        then wonder, "What are they holding?"

23.  Linger over the knowledge that anytime you feel the grease in your body
        glow is good.

148. Note that each moment is like a flower with a center and petals in
         various degrees of opening—has scent, texture and color—but see
         farther too you are its root and the longer and deeper you are still the
         more vivid it is rendered.

88.  Have the elevator door open on you onto her onto candlelight onto an
        evening lolling together and together and together watching her watch
        you and all the gladness having time in the exigencies of human rhyme.

127. Remember three drops of red in the snow.

87.  Discover there is something in you that's smarter than you because it
         doesn't think.

The opportunity to earn more than an academic's salary was so tempting that Martin put philosophy on hold. "At the time, I was 26 and my wife was pregnant," he says in an interview, "and I was worried about money."

What he observed in the jewellery business, though, was more worrisome: His novel vividly describes shady dealings - counterfeiting, fake contracts and wire fraud - and the lifestyle of drugs, gambling and prostitutes that went along with it.

Martin's own balance was equally fragile. He spiralled into substance abuse, and depression. He kept a Glock handgun fully loaded at his office and would put the pistol into his mouth every day.

"I still remember the oily taste of that gun," he says. "I wanted to kill myself, but I just couldn't make myself do it."

This horrific ritual went on for months - until Martin started writing. Documenting his hellish descent was "hugely cathartic," he says, and helped release some of the "strange tension that's inside of me." It also gave him the kick he needed to get out of the jewellery business and back to philosophy.

The defense says Mamie Till knows her son’s
alive and well, that she knows the body isn’t his.
That her lawyers came in weeks ago and dug a body up
and used it for their own. That they’ve found fresh graves.
That a Yazoo City widow found her husband’s gone.
That Lazarus ain’t walking back through Eden,
Greenwood, Itta Bena. That Jesus Christ ain’t come.
Every Laflore County lawyer can’t be wrong.
One juror says he knows it, seen rights workers
take their shovels out along the roads at night.
That Sheriff Strider’s right. That it’s the northern poison
got this all stirred up. That though a black might be
fool enough to swim with a gin fan round his neck,
this one wasn’t one. That they should sit a while
and drink a pop, to make it look right, look real.

Some people might give up their second-born to write as well as Kaye Gibbons." Now, she has a mug shot worthy of Nick Nolte.

A bee in a yellow dress appears

When the change comes
it will be severe
it will be a drowning
it will be a plane crash
it will be the boy from honor camp who waved to me across
the lake when I was 12 followed me home stood outside my
window for 16 days whispering I’m going to kill you
he meant it that boy that boy
I am out of time
bind my ankles with a Flo-Motion jump rope
barter
suffocate
penny farthing bicycle
propped against the shed
I love these biting games
pinching games
slapping games
what will you trade
this time
what will you take
what