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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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

For they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.      —Hosea 8:7 I. Labor Theodore Thompson Genoways, born June 24, 1907 The midwife says, Bite this strop. Outside, burn-killed limbs— once spread wide as the province of God—pile in cords, sorted from kindling to cook-logs. Lynn tears muslin into even strips, watching Wallace through…

He found them bedded in ice, in the frozen puddles     Among reeds and clumps of sedges in the marsh:         House and field crickets lying near the surface On their sides or upside down, their brittle hind legs     Cocked as if to jump as free as fiddlers         In the final rain before…

Each flake is an old Cape Cod church with its steeple broken off. Still it is possible to locate a hymn within. I was handed a thin porcelain implement by a man prepared to die. He said, They are alike: the baton of the maestro, the whitestick of the sightless.