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Match

Yellow fingers lift a match to Virginia's shreds and edges: Deeply I pull smoke in, and blood faints at the door. My young father coughs, gags, and wipes his lips with pale narrow fingers: When he looks at his shaking hands, splaying them out to gaze at them, I understand how much his nails please…

Pantoum du chat

Charles and I go out together in his boat, which is a cat- amaran, in the burnishing weather, elated. so it's not surprising that in his boat, which is a cat at top speed among cats, this poem begins. Elated. so it's not surprising that we sing “Speed Bonnie Boat” to the winds. At top…

Waiting for the Thaw

Ben wriggles around, crowding closer. He's cold. More than that, he wants his mother to be awake. He presses against her, feeling for her heartbeat. It's not a beat he can count, separate knocks through her skin. It's more a constant soft rustle, like a mouse scratching around under a pile of dry leaves. There's…

Pleasures of the Voyagers

Beautiful beautiful nowhere. Lightly canoeing. Day sultry. Me desultory. Toing and froing testing the bottom for bass, or in fact just yoyoing aimless assortments of ornament up and down. Very encouraging soundtrack, once you get into it. Whole Canadian laid-back percussion section. Woodpecker, marshhen, dittybug, loon, frog. Sidemen, all of them, happy to just hit-it-when-indicated….

Love Song: Accidental Species

Remember when we were introduced to the only man in Oregon who had seen Diomeda cauta, the White-Capped Albatross also known as Shy, whose normal range is deep air deep off the continental shelf, and spoke of the Harlequin Duck, of Histrionicus histrionicus: Rather small, he said; mostly silent. You looked at him strangely. He…

The Scout

Penn Valley Park, Kansas City, 1936 In bronze you sit, safe now from the obsessions of decline, your pony beneath you, your hand held to your head, you gaze exhausted at the city that has risen against the plain, as if this earth, in unfaithful partnership, had pulled a pistol. After decades of that quick…

Last Straw

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The Odalisques of Matisse

I can't say, staring at the wall of odalisques with their pellucid breasts, plump bellies, whether I want to be one of them, dazed by the petulant heat of the Midi, a white towel barely covering my damp thighs, or the old painter himself, white hair waving across his sweaty brow as he mixes the…