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Epithalamion

After it all, a bridesmaid hands you the vodka                     you’ve waited for, so clear and chill   it tastes bell-like against your tongue, as though   it could hollow you from your heart outward,                     hollow you as February hollows the fields   beyond the church, the sliced cornstalks   thinly rustling. You’re impatient for crocuses,…

Cornfield with Doves

It’s getting toward my time to be enrolled among the legions of the fallen pretty-good poets. A grateful earth has patted their heads.   And here’s my head, this failing crop of white hairs mown to stubble; these dry discolored lumps half-hidden in it, recalling all those   makeshift graves in the bullet-mown Cornfield at…

First House

City-born, we’d never lived in view of a horizon,   or beneath the expansive blue above sheep,   but rent in Iowa was cheap, including more green   beans than we could eat, wildflowers grew from water   in empty jars. In fall, the hardwoods burn without   a fire and make no excuse for…

Pentimento

After they split, my father used scissors to cut my mother from our childhood photos; blacked out her name in the lower-left corners of large paintings of wild horses, of men huddled together in a desert wedding against a burnt sienna sky, of little scarlet gondolas in Venice, the canal always the same cerulean. I…

Speechless

First date, bowling alley. Poor choice, no chance to talk, one of us always taking a turn. When he bowled, his hip curved, same stance as when he played trumpet, school band where we met. After two games, still silent, we held hands in our center lane, the eye, movement all around us, bowlers, spinning…

The Underneathedness

After Camille Dungy’s “characteristics of life”                                Today I misheard the word eternity as the trinity. I was looking at those birds, falling from the sky, thousands of them, a photo of their corpses in the Times, lined up on a white sheet of paper, like words. Warbler. Flycatcher. Swallow. Eternity. Trinity. Die-off. An airplane…

Pieta

—for Richard McCann At first it was unacceptable— strangers dressed in black, walking away or toward a hole in the ground, each a version of you. Seven hundred reasons to dig holes in the earth—some look for water, some need a fence. Some for this seed, some for that body. my God, your body. When…

Cut

When the home-aid nurse comes to check on my mother’s drainage tube I am sharpening my knives with my new Bavarian edge. When I hear the nurse say proximity to the toxin, I entertain the thought that disease might be seen as a measure of intimacy. A knife is my favorite kitchen helper. Come a…