Only the colorless eye is undistracted: a lake Rubbed blue by twilight is not blue to the eye cast blue And a violet sunset cannot be refracted Violet through the violet eye. A crimson retina Won’t conceive the paint of a rigging blooded by dusk Or the stain a star makes, cutting its patina Crimson…
The tree bore the efflorescence of October apples like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. The wind blew in cold sweet gusts, and the burning taste of fresh snow came with the gradual dark down through the goldenrod. The blue and scarlet sky was gently losing its color, as if from…
Sharper than the scythe, which, like the ladder and the boards I couldn’t lift, was long. And quicker, since it was smaller, and, swung in an arc, would sing. I was the age of Latin in school, mollis for mullein, the flannel of whose leaf girls would rouge their Quaker cheeks with, for whom vanity,…
A low sound in the hollows fills low places, fills hollows, carves a hollow from the right place or hollows being in place, a sound I heard in a strange place, in a strange state, just off the road in southern Utah, just over the border, just off the desert, where a field of wheat…
It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast…
off-season home of a circus elephant Here, the past forgets its boundaries, shines through abandoned objects: the caved tin roof of the slave quarters, wind-beaten planks and rusted knives scattered in dust and sand. Soon, the elephant will make her slow way down this path, graze among the ruins and pines; each step an…
Everything rots but flowers leave memories. I was the boy who loved flowers, dried, fresh, not just their fragrance but their bee-stung bodies prayerfully folded into dusty skin. I was the boy who walked limp-limbed, scent-drunk, with the smell of spit on my hands, swearing: Relinquish me of my desire to be sunlit, beautiful. They…
You came upon me like a shadow and you came into me like a shadow and there you dwelled within me and I in you; we were cast on the black water— we were cast by the will of the wind— and thrown upon the darker shore where no things grow and the dry leaves…
“Name the eight states that begin with the letter M,” Mohammed, my driving teacher, says. I’m forty-one. Am I in school? I glance at the rearview mirror, glad I can’t see my embarrassing STUDENT DRIVER bumper sticker. I spread a ghost-map across the windshield, quickly scroll down the East Coast, top to bottom. “Maine. Massachusetts….
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