I run the comb through his lush hair. letting it think into my wrist the way the wrist whispers to the cards with punctuation and savvy in a game of solitaire. So much not to be said the scissors are saying in the hasp and sheer of the morning. Eleven years I've cut his hair…
When within the impenetrable green this morning is (thicket, wicker basket), the better to hear shade in shadow, twigs and stabs of light, I shut my eyes: the mockingbird sings in threes, like Dante, ninety-eight rhymes in seventeen cantos; rocks throne to throne, imbibing; wrings out each note, scrubbing on the old washboard, lets the…
‘The Excavation', ‘History’, and ‘Meurig Dafydd to His Mistress' are three poems from what I hope will be a continuing sequence of alternative monologues. That is to say, personae poems in which a different version of myth or history is adumbrated. As Euripides once stressed, Helen did not necessarily end up in Troy!. Absurd those…
I don't stay in town long. I drive out to Race Point— bright stunt kites, diving and sailing in the stiff north wind, and people walking the beach. The sea's sunny and dark. I drive on, down to Herring Cove, park, and walk the beach myself. A man and woman are fishing. “What do you…
One Intimations Falling Maybe children wake to a love affair every morning or so, maybe that's why, if they are given any chance, they seem to like the world so much. Maybe falling for the world is a thing that happens to them all the time. I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace….
to Peter Vansittart The last war-horse slaughtered and eaten long ago. Not a rat, not a crow-crumb left; the polluted water scarce; the vile flies settling on the famous enlarged eyes of skeleton children. Tonight the moon's open-mouthed. I must surrender in the morning. But those cipher tribes out there, those Golden Hordes, those shit!…
This isn't a story I want to tell, or need to. I've shoveled the night's hard snowfall from the drive and heaped it, mailbox-high, for the neighbor kids to stomp over. I've fed the squirrels and put out black sunflower and wild weed seed for the birds— the female cardinal rose and dusky and black…
I must train myself to no longer exist but as a stone lifted and thrown to wherever I land, a new place, a new odor to it and new sound and action surrounding me, all this without the thought of loss, despair, or hope, a preparation for loss. Such a life would be god's, if…
No word I huffed when Stradling urged the squire to throw my eulogy on the fire. The fiddlers laughed. I, snow-silent, proud, did not melt. But I'm spitless now, my pearl, my buttercup, my bread-fruit. I rattle their silver in my pocket. I have other stanzas for harp and lute, other gullible lords to flatter….
No products in the cart.