J. Barrett Wolf

There's such a small difference
Between
Being alive and living.
Serotonin, acetylcholine, peptides
...

If you kissed me, would I understand the slow, fertile music of Neruda?
Could your mouth teach me patience,
the way Aguardiente teaches warmth in the night,
penitence in the morning?
...

Changing universal joints.
Replacement the hips live in a slow sea of grease.
The floor is insulated from my steel-toed boots
by a cushion of grime and 30-weight oil
...

I am not homeless
there is a number on my door
a room mate cat quilt desk sofa
spray bottles under the sink.
...

ach of us types...
Copywriting for our own little ad agency
Selling long walks on the beach
Candlelit dinners
...

[For Ginnie’s old man…Satch Sanders]

He walks
Not on
...

The appendage police came the other day and threatened to confiscate my hands.
They said I was writing subversive songs and anti-status-quo articles and screw-the-system poetry. They told me to straighten up and fly right 'cause after all, they knew what was good for me and how would I like to go around with no hands to write or eat or touch with?
Later the brain police arrived and told me to stop having subversive, anti-status-quo, screw-the-system thoughts. They offered me an all expense paid surgical procedure that would help me fit in with the rest of their designer world.
'Just wait, ' they said, 'If you don't come around, you'll be sorry... We can adjust those little gray cells of yours and you'll be just fine.'
...

You would take the dead to a place like this -
Freight on a splintered shipyard dock,
Flowers to be borne across the dirty water
To the grove of the nameless.
...

Here is an acre of the old North Field
where Sam Bouton, Frederick Peck and his wife Sarah B.,
The Greenes, Scofields, Hoyts and Haffs lie.
Morning cold shivers stones toward one another;
...

I get in one last, quick ride
Before the hinting tumult of clouds coalesce
Into the thunder light show and
Bucket cat dog pianos of rain.
...

Miles, wires, the clicks of keyboard
Muses, myth, rumor and legend
Artifacts and ancestors lives,
loves and losses painted on body canvas
...

I would deny Galileo
Make the moon the center of the universe
The tides a commandment
From the very lips of an ancient God
...

Captured by a last fall-warm night in November
I make my way through brown, fading grass
To the river.
...

I want to kiss you
To taste the uncertain closeness
That rhymes with the smell of your hair.
To take, in my shivery way
...

Hearing your name reminds me of crosses
Sunk in the unforgiving dust
Along the road to Santiago
In a country of earth and green cane
...

A woman returns to what is left of her house…
She bears a mark
On the tip of one finger…
...

On a warm midsummer evening
I ride the sixty or so miles back from Boston
Playing tag with a terra cotta moon.
Blood orange dark, at first, through the trees
...

I do not know how to love in the way of grain.
The way wheat moans before a south wind,
anticipating crosscurrents, bowing without wonder,
reflecting the echoed shadow of oceans.
...

Because it is fire and air,
earth and water,
that paint determination in your eyes,
The elements that make up life
...

Your lanky frame resides outside my area of expertise.

I graze the narrow aisles of Barnes and Noble
Fields of prosaic sunflower paragraphs,
...