Dipping our shoulders under with each lunge we twelve far-pregnant women stride the shallow children's pool stretching our bulbous bodies out. Blue pool. White light. Late afternoon: the beams surge low and full. “The sun is god.” A dozen heads rock: shrugs pushing the shimmer of round into flat. Each color tends to color the…
Please don't take the cemeteries. We can't sleep when the dead fidget in air, their frantic fingers hushing the wind. We'll give bread, or pastures, even the trees tucked into themselves like frightened children. But please don't take the cemeteries. For each stone there is a blossom, a tear, an empty room where someone waits…
All night I search the dead for inspiration. Outside, the lawns have turned to wilderness. Plows turning the snow. Gusts of wind dissolve in a tangle of elms. Ice forms on the new roof. Weakens it. Too much trying has finally ended. No one seems ever to come or to go. Only the taillights of…
Who in his right mind would hold the brothers to blame? They lived in their own mental torment, unrelieved by day or their own lies. The sun dropped like a stone one night and the brothers talked on. The past, the son, the younger people in their life. The garden. The heart can approach the…
What in the sour wind Made the voices come again And the trees begin To move in? Spoken to And spoken for, You were waited upon And waiting. The leaves woke On the windcombed branches, And the footed trunks Not in twos advanced But like a lightless fire From the hill descended. * * * You…
(for my father) What the world spoke today was not the world but what I thought of it. Six days of rain. Through my blurred slice of window I saw a fragment of what there is to see. How small I am. How large to notice that space among spaces. And shortening my vision I…
The store could be in Nova Scotia, it doesn't open unless someone's there. Across the far field the moon is waning, a bright bird still sings in the dark, a car is in the ditch. The car has lain there for almost 20 years. Across the field from my cousin Harold's there was a house…
Consider that I have loved you for forty-nine years, that I have loved you since childhood despite the storms that have wasted my life. . . . I have loved you, I love you and will continue to love you, and I am sixty-one years old, I know the world and have no illusions. —Hector…
For days the last day has burned the palm like a rough rope and each child vibrates with escape, dreaming past the swing and collide of bees in heavy sunlight. The mountain ash drags its silver knuckles against the window pane. The nuns glisten and continue. In Polish accents they say what heaven says, this…
No products in the cart.