Crickets in the basement stairwell (funky with leaf-rot, mildew, sweating concrete) screel a daylong prayerwheel with jays and starlings punctuating that chitinous ratcheting. Summer is winding down. On the mantel downstairs a steadier clucking housed in ceramic, and looking like a linoleum-covered Taj Mahal, releases a cogwheel, whirs, bongs, reminds me of Dallie (Miss Valeria…
After a night of rain like a waterfall, The stony lane that winds up Knocknarea Is a runnel of swift water winding downward. You should wear your Wellingtons and carry a stick. The stones are slippery and the dog at the gate Is fierce and requires a cheerful word in passing. The way up is…
The double-barreled twelve gauge that knocked even our father back a step when he fired it; the pump-action twenty-gauge he later gave to me; the pistol (Mother's favorite) we thought was a Yankee's, its notched hammer becoming its rear sight when it was cocked; the damaged Kentucky long rifle; two over-and-under shotgun-rifles; and a thirty-thirty…
Once the world was waiting for a song when along came this. Some said it was a joke funny ha-ha but at the end too lachrymose to last. Others that it was writ holier than thou and should be catechized, then set to turgid dirges, wept over with gnashed fang, wrung palm. The ancient declaimed…
This air is a close shave, slicing across the frozen ponds, scraping chins raw, icicle-edged and keen as stars. Wind meets small resistance, skimming the spiky sedge when such cold hills etch their bulk on polished sky and the men come stamping after the beagles — rabbit-hunters — across the slopes as the sun sets….
for Philip Dow Two hundred waxwings! Swarming on berry bunches like bees to a comb, bats on a cave ceiling. Their greedy thrashes flounced branchlets every which way so the tree looked palsied with panic — or ecstasy? We focused on each soft brown squirm flashing small bursts of wild yellow. Each bird was stemmed…
The zinnias, not blood-red as planned, nudge out strange yellowish blooms, never reach the height the packet claimed. Verbena sprays turn purple where I'd wanted white. Love-in-a-mist foliage spreads, a lovely feathery green, but never buds. I can't stop fiddling with them, watering, urging, staring them down as though I can will them into a…
When your house is smashed by an avalanche, and in the family room, where only minutes ago you were watching General Hospital, you lie moaning, crisscrossed with ribbons of wood and wool, until hours later an Airedale pulls you out by one ankle, do you get up in the snow and tap-dance? You know, in…
I sing tree, making green school after school of leaf-fish flicker between the shade and sunlight in nets of branch, urging the students to see, to see— and one says: I like the brown tree. So I look: she has conjured one of those scrawny northern cedars, arbor vitae, dead or alive, one can’t tell,…
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