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  • Keep

    I am laying my hands on the sleeping child, on this thin flesh over the winged scapula, pressing—just so—as bread is pressed. For this is the bread that falls and rises and these are the shoulder blades that cut to the nervous bone of love. But I want to press harder, tougher like a wrestler…

  • The Collaboration

    That was the summer I used the Duino Elegies in all of my seductions, taking Rilke from my briefcase the way another man might break out candlelight and wine. I think Rilke would have understood, would have thought the means justified the ends, when I began to read in a voice so low it forced…

  • Joseph Carr (1917- )

    Out of the old noon sun still lifting            wraiths from morning's gully,      the phoebe's call assails the barn—      its shingles are nearer the heart of gray in the shadows of those deep            eaves. Summer, the huckster,      wends over Blinn's Hill, having sold      snippets of blue thread, a needle, some ribbon, perhaps a pan…

  • 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…