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  • Landscape Mode

    Overlooking the Cumberland River, Clarksville, Tennessee, early November 1996   In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river, ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along, pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity of Hollywood…

  • Outside Monterey

    Outside Monterey the highway runs by the sea and the torch singer on the radio has a voice like twilight: “I couldn’t love you more, child, if time was running out . . .” My ten-year-old shaved his head when his mother left, looked oddly more adult last night, coloring the Stay Out sign for…

  • The Scarf

    A turquoise silk scarf, elegantly long, and narrow; so delicately threaded with pale gold and silver butterflies, you might lose yourself in a dream contemplating it, imagining you’re gazing into another dimension or another time in which the heraldic butterflies are living creatures with slow, pulsing wings. Eleven years old, I was searching for a…

  • The Soul as a Body

    There’s a body inside the body. It’s the form that rises up, immune to fire. It’s the kingdom of nothing as a body. High nothing! You see its shell in the mirror, draw back. Feel ashamed. It wakes in a dream and speaks in silence. Suffers names. What do you call it? The one as…

  • Ice Fishing

    From open water at the lake’s unfrozen outlet, steam rises, a scrim dim enough to turn the sun as round as a dime, though it’s still so bright across snow, so low in the sky it rings with a ball-peen clang behind his eyes, each time he looks up from his augured hole in the…

  • Auspicious Things

    In a dream: a poem from the next century.          —Elias Canetti   Of the thirty-eight things listed, most are slight, would hardly register otherwise: an albino sifting through trash in an alley; cracks forming & widening between lakes of snow on a windshield; the foil from chewing gum. In the time of the thirteenth baktun,…

  • The Snow Leopard of St. Louis

    Something bellowed. No one manned the zoo’s ticket window, only from somewhere came an echo, a cry lifted bodily over the fence. And there was the keeper’s little door at the back of a cage. The well-scrubbed floor, the animal just a furious blur. Next door a giraffe somehow stretched down to tongue the leaves…

  • Cargo

    You have seen vines climbing themselves, as though the moon were riding inside.                               Hordes of ants scooting along one spot and then scooting back again, sporting banners many times their size of butterfly wings. Consider an unruly nation, a revolution gathering forces, like this body of yours, wholly politic.               In its momentary congress, each…

  • Meditation

    The world sneaks back. Like the small dog that lives up the street, small enough he needn’t wait for her to open the gate. Alone, she goes farther inside where the shore’s swept so clean it becomes meaningless. And that’s the beauty of it, looking down the beach it’s empty, a long well of sunlight…