Entering, I step up into a foyer of tea-chairs and brochures engraved with solemn questions. My friend lies in a far chapel under some candles and bas-reliefs, looking wind-flushed in a half-open casket and black suit, like he's playing dead but healthier than in years. Seeing him hits me like a slap and I actually…
Half-hidden in the kitchen's semi-darkness, Ira stood at a window, watching lights come on in a farmhouse across the road. He saw her figure framed in yellow light, and then she slowly drifted away. Christmas tree lights came on pulsing, casting shadows, dappling the snow outside. Beyond her house the sky hung low on a…
As I recall, it was night in another country. Bare-chested men were shattering windows, inviting in some slight breeze. Small antiquated fans rattled, making silence an exotic and far-away resort. I was a young girl. I closed my eyes. I slid the back of my hand across my cheek. It seemed someone else's wrist. She…
It was love and then it was poetry but it was poetry that believed in love. It was doubt and then well, it was faith but it was poetry we worried the beads of. It was death and then —or before then? in the actual face of— in the deep pilings of— fallen in the…
The mismatched, worn plates waited on the table, clouds of steam rose from the kettle of boiling potatoes and condensed on the windows. Mae slid the big frying pan onto the hot front lid and knocked in a spoonful of bacon fat. When the pan smoked she laid in thick pieces of pork side meat….
Organ adrift in a chipped dish, dime- store item at garden's edge, gray glob in golden beer, died last night, one less to slink under the leaves of the fattening squash, eggplant, peppers pushing the flowers, gray matter, matter of fact, phallus without a bone, as the panicked mother said, her new- born's limp, and…
My first impulse is to write a poem of my own, the way Olympic ice dancing makes me want to skate in an indoor arena. Better than anyone, I know where to touch my body, how to tighten long laces and leave earth, how to train on empty ice and prefer it. I can't resist…
In May I can't see dogwood bloom without recalling how it once was huge as hickory till Christ was nailed to one. Since then dogwoods are twisted, small. A legend. A lie. But I can't get it from my mind. That's not the only lie I've seized: I've heard a preacher say the dead, in…
Mountain-tips soften after so much rain, the wild guesses of birds blending with air and the uppermost buds, with a god-like promotion, burst open. Especially beautiful are the brown and drunken bats who nose-dive down the barnside, not quite earth-broken.
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