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  • Florescence on 4th Avenue

    Just as I’m going into the native seed store, where the ancient seeds of the world’s various peoples are kept and sold so that they can perhaps root in tomorrow’s ground, a young man who was just on the other side of the street, yelling furiously at his stoned friend on the other, quiets the…

  • On Joy

    Last night’s rain has filled the fields with cornflowers, blue-bright as moons in children’s books, all milky light. They seem, my father says, the kind of color that could show up in the night. Cornflowers wilt in heat. By noon the sun will burn the fields green, as if no bloom had known them. I…

  • About Eleanor Wilner

    As we change the past, so are we changed. These words, from Eleanor Wilner’s essay "Playing the Changes," are striking for how profoundly they speak not only to the poet and to the practice of poetry—indeed the practice of all art—but for how appropriately they also reveal the human situation—or at least, that impulse within us…

  • In the Moment

    Some days the pond wears a glaze of yellow pollen. Some days it is clean-swept. The trout leap up, feasting on insects. A modest size, it sits like a soup tureen in a surround of white pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort of rescued terrier, part bat (the ears), part anteater (the nose), shyly paddles…

  • Epitaph

    Because I could be written anywhere, I loved the hard surface of the blade, my name carved into barn doors, desktops, the peeled face of a shag-bark hickory. I pressed my whole weight into it, letters grooved deep as the empty field rows along Tri-Lakes where I’d seen my cousin Nick buried in ground so…

  • This, Then

    Every once in a while, it’s true: I get sick of dying. Iambic ghosts choiring                                        their lovely, churchless songs, All the lines of the poem leaning toward terminus Like rows of low windbent weeds—    …

  • Sunnies

    They mouthed the surface of the creek for nymphs tasting their temporary life or striders sculling the tension that was neither water nor air but border, merely. The way a dream nibbles at awareness, the sunnies dared the surface. From the footbridge I saw them school in the little depth below the watercolor that was…